Comment by nothrabannosir
8 hours ago
Are we pretending that nobody has ever tried phasing out smaller denomination currency, and that we don’t have a vast body of actual case studies to draw from? Why are we running thought experiments at all?
8 hours ago
Are we pretending that nobody has ever tried phasing out smaller denomination currency, and that we don’t have a vast body of actual case studies to draw from? Why are we running thought experiments at all?
Americans like to pretend that history and the experience of the rest of the world doesn't exist and that things that large numbers of other countries have done successfully (and which even the US has done in the past, in this case, as the half-penny, after all, was phase out a long time ago) are impossible to do successfully.
Sales taxes as they are known in the US were largely introduced in the 20th century. The half-penny was phased out in the mid-19th century.
The legal structure of sales taxes in the US present some unique challenges that simply don't exist as problems that needed to be solved in other countries. These problems can't be legislated away because the authority to do so is highly decentralized. Pretending that these problems don't exist because they don't exist elsewhere is not helpful.
This is very much a case of the Mencken quote that for every complex problem there is a solution that is simple, obvious, and wrong.
> Pretending that these problems don't exist because they don't exist elsewhere is not helpful.
Pretend that’s everything in the US is globally unique to us also is not helpful. “No one else has sales tax like us” is likely not true but also not super relevant. Tax collecting agencies in 50 states and however many territories could issue guidance tomorrow for how to deal with this and it would have the force of law until/unless legislatures see fit to define different rules.
> for every complex problem there is a solution that is simple, obvious, and wrong.
Sure, but for every simple problem there is a small army of people online pretending it’s insurmountable.
2 replies →
Can you explain further? Canada has sales tax and successfully phased out the penny.
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>The legal structure of sales taxes in the US present some unique challenges
Nothing about sales tax in the US is unique at all. It is not special. It is not hard. It is not a complex problem. It is basically a lookup, and computerized POS systems have managed it just fine since the dawn of computerized POS systems.
In fact, when those sales taxes were first implemented, there was problems relating to how to manage sales that resulted in fractions of a cent worth of sales tax to account for. Several states created sales tax tokens worth fractions of a cent and had to insist that it didn't technically count as money because states can't mint money legally.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sales_tax_token
Nobody went to jail. It was a minor nuisance for consumers and was quickly replaced with law changes to just have explicit rules for the edge case, which is the entire reason we have legislatures. If you don't want retailers to respond to this change in a certain way, have your legislatures say that.
>This is very much a case of the Mencken quote that for every complex problem there is a solution that is simple, obvious, and wrong.
Just stop already. The US is not special. The US regularly insists it cannot do the same things everyone else does and it is just wrong. We literally have textbooks full of examples from our own country. We've already phased out coinage before.
The UK went from it's absurd money system to reasonable and decimalized money within living memory! 15 February 1971. Sweden had a day where they switched from left hand roads to right hand roads! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dagen_H Most of Europe switched to Euros in living memory as well!
Stop insisting reasonable societal problems are too hard to solve, because that's the only actual reason they are hard to solve
>These problems can't be legislated away because the authority to do so is highly decentralized.
It isn't at all. It's in the Federal government, and it's in your local state government, and it's in your local-er governments, and that is just like a lot of other countries. A couple layers isn't "very decentralized".
It is only in the past 50 or so years that a singular political party has insisted that the same political party that did all sorts of speedy and useful lawmaking for a hundred years suddenly cannot adapt quickly. Meanwhile, 48 state governments continue to function mostly fine, with few problems adapting to local specific problems in a timely manner. If your state cannot adapt to this quickly and easily and without serious issues, consider electing different people.
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As others have pointed out, governments sometimes issue actual guidance on how it's supposed to work when they phase out currency. It's not always "just stop making them and see how the market deals with it."
> It's not always "just stop making them and see how the market deals with it."
On the other hand, we’ve been delaying this inevitable and necessary action for decades over hand-wringing about the implications of rounding up or down by a maximum of two damn cents per transactions _for decades_. If we did it “the right way” I’m sure it would take years and years and cost millions of dollars to “study the effects” of eliminating the penny. Just do it already. Even with the best plan in the world people are going to whine about rounding.
It makes no sense to spend more money to mint the actual money, then the money is worth OK. You might not like it, but something has to be done because to continue in a slow and methodical process 1) forgets that the government is the same entity that runs the DMV 2) people love to throw out criticisms of solutions that aren’t perfect not realizing that it’s still better than the status quo. To do nothing is costing money or in the case of Ukraine it’s costing lives. 3) I bet you $100 You don’t like Trump.
1) DMV is state-run, not federal govt. 2) Why can't we at least spend 5 minutes studying how it went in Canada, and learn that govt guidance was helpful to the transition, so do that too? 3) Sure. And even more because, even when he DOES pick up on a good idea (I support elimination of the penny), he does so in a haphazard / slipshod way that the end result is often worse than if nothing had been done.
> 3) I bet you $100 You don’t like Trump.
I actually like Trump (or at least his presidency) a lot more than I think most Hacker News browsers do. I like Trump's presidency more than most of my co-workers and many of my friends do. My arguments in this thread are entirely my own, not the product of some political allegiance.