Australia's rules for how to round are summed up in four dot points here in a single page of info, with another two short paragraphs about how electronic/credit card and cheque transactions are handled (they are not rounded): https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/rounding-and-eftpos-tr...
When the removal of one and two cent pieces actually happened in Australia (1991), all the details were distributed in a pamphlet of just four pages. That amount of information is probably about all people need, literally just a document with some guidelines!
Many issues probably don't need the lengthy deliberative processes that stall or delay change. But the problems with the penny have been apparent for years, maybe even decades. There was plenty of time to study the issue, observe how other economies have made similar transitions and figure out how to make it work in an orderly fashion. Instead, we have a change by executive decree, with no apparent planning. Will the mint start making pennies again in the next administration or the next year? It's certainly possible.
In some states, there's legal uncertainty for retailers that operate without pennies. Planning and forwarning likely would have encouraged states to amend laws to provide for penniless retailers. Uniform nationwide rounding could have been an option, interstate commerce and all that.
Some sort of plan for the pennies themselves might be nice, although maybe some sort of plan could have helped pennies circulate more, reducing the need to mint several billion pennies every year.
The issue with the lengthy deliberative process is that it provides multiple opportunities for motivated, but ultimately damaging to the public, operators to intervene. In this case, I present to you the Americans for Common Cents:
They care more to keep the cent than normal Americans, who ultimately pay for its cost of manufacturing, care to get rid of it. So they'll always win a careful, deliberative process; because they'll show up for the cent _every time_ this comes up. And everyone else gets mildly shafted for no reason.
You just need a clever advocacy group name. Something like Making Cents of our Currency or No Noncents. Or, something along the lines of If the Mint is losing money, it doesn't make cents.
But yes, our system is biased towards those with sustained focus. That does lead to some wrong decisions, but it's probably better than a system biased to action, or biased towards chaos.
Technically, it would have been better for the government to hand a tax on gross business revenue less labor costs, in order to give the Fed a lever to lower price levels inflation and raise household spending power so that the loss of pennies was of as little significance to households as it was to the Mint. Obviously, that would have required years of unpalatable and unsexy planning work that can’t be converted into political capital, but the outcome would have been that pennies become more relevant by lower prices and/or that pennies become less relevant by higher spending power. Oh well.
> Obviously, that would have required years of unpalatable and unsexy planning work that can’t be converted into political capital
It also probably wouldn't have resulted in any actual action. The problem proponents of "unpalatable and unsexy planning work" confront is that their approach is immobilized by its own weight. Analysis, bikeshedding, and litigation destroys the ability to actually do anything.
Discontinuing the penny is obviously an important thing (otherwise, we'd have been done talking about it by now).
It is always best that important government moves are done in public, with processes that are replete with discourse and understanding, instead of with surprises and confusion.
Ideally, the government would had resolved the (present-day, recently-introduced, inevitable, foreseeable) conflict with SNAP benefits and come up with a single-page, large-print summary that uniformly defined how rounding at the checkout counter works in ways that regular people conducting regular transactions would be able to comprehend and follow.
These details certainly all need to be figured out at some point, and sooner would be better than later: We should have started figuring it out years (perhaps even a decade) ago.
Unfortunately, we did not take that path.
Discontinuing the penny could have been a very orderly nothingburger wherein everyone (on all sides of the cash register) knew exactly what to expect, and exactly when to expect it. But but we didn't do it that way.
So instead, we now we have an element of surprise and confusion instead of simplicity.
For anyone who might point out that this lack of planning may lead to incredibly minor price rises for everyone, i'll add that this can be balanced by the very minor inconvenience that will no longer exist. This is inherently unquantifiable, but as people here love pointing out that doesn't mean it's not worth something.
Without planning and the resultant guidance, we stand to be inconvenienced every time one of the customers in front of us and the cashier have differences in their ideas for how rounding works.
(But that's OK, I guess: After all, that's just an aggregate of many millions of little inconveniences, instead of some somewhat larger inconveniences for a few people in advance. Their time is clearly more important than yours is, or mine is. All hail the chief.)
If dealing with the absence of the penny were straight-forward, then there would be no real discussion about it today. We'd already be moving along [mostly!] according to the new, published normal and things would be a snoozefest.
But there is no guidance provided. Accordingly, we get discussions.
I would like to present this indeterminable discussion (from several days ago) as evidence of the kinds of differing opinions that a lack of planning and guidance brings forth: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45901904
This is the kind of discussion that the dust should have settled on years ago.
I don't get it, what guidance do you really require? Do you think there will be some major cartel by the retailers to rip the costumers off, at maximum, 0.04 cents of a dollar per every purchase in the absolute worst case scenarios?
Will we have major lawsuits about it? "Latest news: Costumer sues Walmart for 1 billion USD for rounding a 157.01$ bill to 157.05$"
Last night, I paid $13.00 for a pizza that was priced at $12.99. This does not faze me at all.
But there absolutely are people who complain about this kind of thing. I don't have to understand it in order to recognize it, and nor do you: Neither of us were born yesterday, and we've both been in line behind people with these proclivities at the checkout counter ourselves -- observing them argue over literal pennies.
A lack of guidance cannot serve to quell these conflicts.
> Will we have major lawsuits about it? "Latest news: Costumer sues Walmart for 1 billion USD for rounding a 157.01$ bill to 157.05$"
Will we have a discussion that is free of superfluous and undue hyperbole?
But, that’s the thing. Hyperbole is the only way of doing this an issue. Like you said with your example, any minimally functional citizen won’t have any trouble with this.
It might be said that it is true that you can't reason a person out of a position that they didn't reason themselves into -- even with the use of hyperbole.
But I am not unreasonable. I arrived where I am rationally.
And hyperbole here simply injects misguided, disingenuous noise into our interactions where no noise is necessary at all.
Don't sell yourself short. If I can discuss it without going hyperbolic, then so can you.
It would be trivial to issue useful guidance, and that guidance would be beneficial even if it was incredibly stupid or misguided or even caused it's own problems, because it is a document that demonstrates that some thinking somewhere went into it, and someone has taken a minute to think through outcomes and effects.
But the premise of the current administration is that the world is radically simpler than "experts" and "bureaucrats" want you to believe, and they purposely and loudly eschew any thinking about 2nd, 3rd, or often even 1st order effects of their proposals because they want them to sound "simple" to rather simple people, and rely on trite soundbites or false "truisms" to keep them propped up, and also because even a surface level examination of most of their claims or proposals forces you to confront how stupid they usually are.
This administration and it's fiercest supporters view not thinking through things as a virtue. They view large proscriptions from the throne as good governance, because they want a king.
That is very explicitly why what they did was wrong, even if it's not a big deal to get rid of the penny, and very few people will have problems with it, and I think state governments and even the fed really shouldn't have a problem accommodating it.
Being purposely ignorant like that is stupid and wrong even when it doesn't have negative repercussions, because it WILL have negative repercussions somewhere, and they will be entirely preventable. See innocent citizens being deported and assaulted, and the extrajudicial murder of random drug mules driving cartel speedboats.
The federal government and current administration has a tiny army of professionals who are sufficiently well equipped and paid to wargame out exactly this kind of thing to discover some corner cases. We are still paying them even as they do nothing. The current admin is so incompetent and averse to actual governance that they reject working systems that could even help them make their agenda a reality, but the bureaucracy being good and effective at what it does is antithetical to their worldviews and hostile to their individualist philosophies, and it's more important to make the government look bad than actually succeed at what they were elected to do.
