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Against my better judgement I clicked on the CGP Grey video about "why nickels should be discontinued" they say something like:
"It costs the government more than 5 cents to make a nickel and once you incorporate the cost of minting and labor it's 13 cents..."
All this results in a "loss" of 100million.
This seems logical enough, but when a government is minting money does it make sense to count "manufacturing costs" as if the government were a business that sells.. uh ... money?
@redpy5@sunbeam.city@futurebird I've personally been on the "stop making pennies and nickles" bandwagon for a decade or so now. It's a waste of metal and manufacturing imo. I know Canada got rid of their penny and now you only really find it in circulation here in the US where people use it accidentally or interchangeably with the US penny.
While we might not suddenly have $100 million or whatever if we stopped making them, it would free up some labor and manufacturing infrastructure/land to do something more useful for most people. And I think that's what people are kinda saying when they say it costs more to make these coins then the value we give them for spending. Maybe I'm projecting tho and most people think they'll get a rebate or something if we just stop minting them 
@redpy5 100 million isn’t gonna do much on the federal level at all. And that is almost certainly overestimating the “savings” — I can support getting rid of pennies but this should be a question based around what we need money to do for us— arguments about the “cost” miss the point. Do we like having pennies? Do people find them useful? that’s the metric.
@futurebird I can get behind that. It's a silly argument if you think of it as the only argument for getting rid of them. I think the point that it now always costs more to produce them then the coin is worth is an indicator that we don't need it anymore and an easily made argument to most people in addition to other arguments about the small coins (our fiat should be cheap and easy to produce unless we want to show off or whatever). But it being the main framing instead of "how often do most people pass one on the ground when they are busy", or something else indicating it's use value, is very business management brained and annoying. I agree for sure on that.