The following is a letter to the editor from Rhino Times reader Austin Morris
Abolishing the Penny seems like a good idea at first blush, but there would be two negative consequences.
Without the ability to make exact change in cash, merchants will inevitably start folding sales tax into the listed price, rather than adding it to the price. So a $10.00 item will come to be priced at $10.70 (incl. tax) on shelves.
I’ve seen this before. When VAT (Value Added Tax, a variant of sales tax) was introduced in the UK, many stores initially quoted their prices as “plus VAT”, so the VAT was added to the transaction at the end, as we do here. But ultimately they all folded the tax into the price, for the sake of clarity and simplicity. That’s what will happen when the US penny is taken out of circulation. This provides cover for government to hike sales tax without paying a political price. So, if Skip Alston or the Greensboro Transit Authority succeed in jacking up our Sales Tax to 10% (for the sake of argument), then the price of our $10.00 item would rise from $10.68 or $10.70 to $11.00. Because the tax has become invisible to the consumer, the merchant is always blamed for the price hike. There’s nothing Leftists like better than tax hikes that cause them no heat. That is how the UK’s VAT – once 8% – got to its current 20%.
Additionally, the inability to receive full and correct change in transactions will nudge people more and more to use plastic rather than cash. The Leftists, the Globalists, the statists and all other closet totalitarians are determined to eliminate cash. They can’t monitor or control cash like they can with funds that go through banks. Canada’s PM Justin Trudeau infamously froze the bank accounts and cards of the truckers who dared to protest his policies. If that isn’t a warning about the totalitarianism of a cashless society, what is? In a nutshell :
CASH = PRIVACY + FREEDOM
CARDS = SURVEILLANCE + CONTROL.
We must protect our right to use cash as legal tender, or a huge part of our liberty will be lost.
Yes, it costs 3 cents to make a penny coin and the government loses money on each one produced.
Don’t worry – they make it up on the Benjamins.
Keep our pennies. Keep our cash.
Austin Morris
