Revisited: Minting Money Costs

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Now the cost of minting coins among the many ways
the Trump administration is seeking to save taxpayers money through
the production of money or the lack they're off, as
the case now happens to be with a penny. As
President Trump noted in announcing the administration's policy to end
the production of pennies, he said, for far too long,

(00:21):
the United States has minted pennies, which literally cost us
more than two cents. This is so wasteful. I've instructed
my secretary with the US Treasury to stop producing new pennies.
Let's rip the waste out of our great nation's budget,
even if it's a penny out of time. Okay, so
what President Trump said is actually understated. Over the past year,
the average cost to produce a penny turned out to

(00:44):
be over three cents. You know, there are a lot
of ways the federal government creates a negative taxpayer ROI,
but perhaps none that are done so directly. But it
wasn't just the penny that led to the treasury taken
a hit. In total, the US Treasury lost a one
hundred and seventy nine million dollars in the production of
coins last year. That's largely due to the nickel being

(01:07):
a money loser too. So let me break this down.
After hearing about the penny and went, let's figure this
out for all the coins that are produced. This is
the cost of production for each coin to the government.
The penny most recently costs the federal government three point
zero seven cents to create. Yeah, more than three times,

(01:30):
pretty absurd to do that. But the nickel, what would
you expect the nickel to cost to produce? Survey says
eleven and a half cents. Yep, So there's another one
that costs more than twice what it is worth. And
then you have the dime. The dime, meanwhile, comes in

(01:51):
at five point three cents to produce. Even then, you
know it's you could produce the nickel for that. Like
you say, I know what we do. We just go
ahead and we flip the We make the nickel, the
dime and the dime. The next that you'd still lose
money on both. The quarter comes in at eleven point
six cents to produce and the half dollar at twenty

(02:13):
six cents. So yeah, if the penny should stop being
produced due to a negative value proposition, at a minimum,
the nickel should go too. And then you've got the
bit of irony that does come with the dime. The
costs less than half of the production of the nickel,
but has actually worked twice as much. No word from

(02:33):
President Trump as if the nickel will be the next
to go, but it should, and there perhaps should also
be a conversation about really whether we need to be
in the coin production business generally given the production costs
they just mentioned, or at a minimum, if the composition
of the metals in the remaining coins should change to
help reduce the overall expense of production.