If this happens, let me know about a year in advance so I can stash my life savings in the soon to appreciate penny.

Copper mining and refining is very bad on the environment, and just because something else is worse [in some repsects] doesn't make the bad thing any less bad. But he's 100% right on the art problem. Just put the nice Lincoln portrait on the nickel, and problem solved. But they'll never do that, because they can't leave well enough alone. Example - the post office, with their stamp art products. They always throw some cheesy thing in to ruin it. Also guilty, but not the gummint - UPS, the new logo, ugh, horrors. It's not that new anymore but it still pains.

Aesthetes such a you all are a plague on us ordinary people who expect a nickel to buy five cents worth of goods, not set a standard for community art.  I use nickels all the time.  Jefferson's picture has not contributed even infinitesimally to deterioration of my quality of life.

Given the way the dollar looks these days perhaps we ought to scrap the penny, the nickel, the dime, the quarter and the dollar and just move over to the renmimbi and whatever fractions of renmimbi are called.

Just design a plastic coin that has the aesthetics of a penny and the value of a nickel - the Nenny! or perhaps the Pickel?  - Or, more likely, just hang in there for another five years and the combination of inflation and technology will make all coins obsolete.

ndmac. kuai and fen, yi kuai shi fen is the same as 1 yuan and ten cents.

We should get rid of the pennie and the nickel both. and afterwards redo our notes and lop off one zero from our currency. a dime would then become the new penny.

Bad on both, then! Copper content wise. The nickel and penny. I have the flu.

Can we just quintuple the value of an existing currency? Wouldn't we have to take four out of five existing pennies out of circulation?

sdemuth, why are aesthetes a plague on you? I don't care about March Madness, or whatever that basketball thing is that's going on, but I don't mind that others care. I just scroll down, or surf past the ESPN block of channels, remove an entire section of the paper, and go on my merry way.

I still say Obama should propose getting rid of the penny (he can order an improved nickel if he wants, too) and the dollar bill, implementing a new dollar coin with George Washington on it, and putting Reagan on the quarter. Save the government $200 million a year, help the environment, and rattle the GOP base with "why didn't McCain propose that already" questions. The symbolism would help to reinforce the message to independents that Obama is a new kind of Democrat, and reinforce a subtler message to conservatives that McCain isn't really one of them.

I'll remind everyone what I mentioned on the other Penny thread:  in 1943, with copper short, me made pennies from steel with a zinc coating.  And they look kinda cool.

psantillana: The "plague" line was written tongue in cheek, although obviously not well enough to make that point.  Offense was not intended.

My real point was that change is, for the vast majority of people, an entirely utilitarian concept.  If it does what we want  - convey value in a convenient fashion - we don't notice it much.  I know I treat it this way  - so much so that since dimes, nickels and pennies basically have no utility in my life anymore, I completely ignore them. leaving the change for the majority of my cash purposes in the hands of the checkout clerk or in the tip cup, so I don't have them weighing down my pockets.  The exception to this is the still rather utilitarian 1 and 2 Euro coins, which I am happy to have in my pocket when in the Euro zone.

How 'bout we make the penny into a nickel, a nickel into a quarter, a quarter into a dollar, a dollar into a five, a five into a twenty, a twenty into a hundred.

The math isn't always consistent, but then all we gotta do is change the little number dealies on all the currency.

Chan, if we follow your scheme, what happens to the fifty? Does it become the currency equivalent of the lost week that England and the American colonies experienced when we switched calendars back in the day, and now nobody really knows when George Washington was born? A bill floating through the economy, invisible when you look directly at it but still present in your wallet, a phantom, unspendable store of value, apprehended only sideways as when rumors circle about pranksters paying their IRS bills with existentially uncertain denominations bearing Grant's grim visage?

Oh, gosh, Rhub, I fergot poor U.S. Grant.  And, I like him, too.

I guess the fifty becomes like the two dollar bill.  There, but ne'er used, except on birthdays.

Or, maybe it becomes like the three dollar bill.

Or maybe, durn it, we make the twenty into a fifty, a fifty into a hunnert.  Then the math is even more off.

Oh, wait, wait, I got an idear.  Let's go back to pounds, shillings, and pence.  No American after Adams was able to figure that out anyway.

The math would be so difficult, that maybe we would have to become numerate again, just to go to the grocery store.

Hey, I skipped the dime, too.  Making Roosevelt a non-person.  Which would still please certain Republicans.

sdemuth, no offense taken. But - and I'm not sure we even disagree on this - maybe you don't notice the looks of coins, or other utilitarian things, but lots of us do. Particularly, I think, as children, when we play with them and line them up in order of year, and - gee it's all coming back to me. Parents kept saying they were just about to leave, and kept not leaving. Pile of pennies forced to provide amusement. For real, though, particularly maybe because manmade things have replaced nature in most people's field of vision, the looks of the stuff around us is important. And yet year by year they seem to be uglier. Well maybe they were ugliest in the 70s/80s, I'm not sure. But old streetlights, old buildings, old Coke ads, all of these things seem to be always way way better looking than the new. What gives?

psantillana, I invite you to acquire an auction catalog from a quality coin dealer.  Superior Galleries in Beverly Hills, is one you might check out online.

When you see the magnificence and beauty of the American coins we minted from the turn of the 19th Century through the first third of the 20th, you will see how far our civilization has degraded.

Our coinage reflects a banal nation, with a sensibility not much above Disneyland.  The work of boring bureaucrats.

I don't believe that's really who we are.  But, it is who our politicians are.  I wish a man of taste would become president, and, like Teddy Roosevelt did, make one of his pet mini crusades to bring a Renaiisance to our coinage.  (Which when Teddy found it, had descended to banality as well.)