Chris Ingraham:
Taxpayers lost $105 million on pennies and nickels last year:
In 2013, the cost of making pennies and nickels exceeded their face value for the eighth year in a row. The cost of minting a penny stood at 1.8 cents, nearly twice its face value. Nickels cost twice as much as dimes – 9.4 cents vs. 4.6 cents – despite being worth only half as much.
The obvious problem is that metal is relatively expensive, or at least more expensive than the loose change created with them. The obvious solutions would be to change the coins' metal composition (yet again) or do away with at least the penny entirely. But there's a catch.
[T]he penny has plenty of supporters in the general public. A 2012 survey by penny lobbying firm ‘Americans for Common Cents’ – funded, not surprisingly, by the zinc industry – found that 2/3rds of Americans favored keeping the penny. While any poll conducted by a lobbying outfit should be treated with skepticism, it’s probably safe to say that the penny and nickel hold special places in many Americans’ hearts [...]
Past attempts to discontinue penny production have been thwarted by the zinc industry (pennies are 97.5% zinc), and Coinstar, which operates the change-redeeming kiosks that are ubiquitous in U.S. grocery stores, as David Owen reported in The New Yorker in 2008.
We could probably take on Coinstar—those big un-vending machines don't look very agile, you could probably outrun them— but nobody messes with Big Zinc.
Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2012—98 large corporations pull ads from Rush Limbaugh, all right-wing shock jocks:
Premiere Radio Networks, distributor of Rush Limbaugh and other right-wing talk radio shows, sent a very interesting memoto its affiliates on Friday.
The emailed memo lists 98 major corporations that have requested their ads appear only on “programs free of content that you know are deemed to be offensive or controversial (for example, Mark Levin, Rush Limbaugh, Tom Leykis, Michael Savage, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity).” […]
Ouch. That, along with the several dozen of companies who've already pulled their ads, has to amount to millions of dollars in revenue.
Has Rush Limbaugh, pioneer of right-wing gasbags on the air, just doomed the genre now that they're all officially labelled "offensive" and toxic by major advertisers? His fellow radio hosts can't be too happy with him, now that they've all got his "slut" taint. Couldn't happen to a more deserving bunch of assholes.
|
Tweet of the Day:
On
today's Kagro in the Morning show, we've got to go back to the ongoing CIA/Senate war today, especially with
Joan McCarter joining us.
Greg Dworkin dropped by first, and we started with that subject, as well as FL-13, the latest WSJ/NBC and Bloomberg polls, Obama's move on overtime pay, and Fernghazi. Joan weighs in on "Ferns" and FL-13 (with help from Bill in Portland Maine) as well, but the bulk of our time (as you might expect) was on the CIA/Senate fight. It's just a constitutional crisis, is all. More on that from
The Nation, and a note for our next show on "My Life as a Retail Worker: Nasty, Brutish and Poor."
High Impact Posts. Top Comments.