(HA, get it?)
So it turns out Canada’s smarter than us and is going to start phasing out their penny. According to Time, the Canadian government released its 2012 budget without any money allotted for penny creation. Which is a smart thing to do, seeing as how a single Canadian penny costs 1.6 cents to produce (a US penny costs even more—2.4 cents).
Canada is slated to stop producing pennies this month, and while products will still be charged to the cent when debit or credit cards are used, the government is suggesting that retailers round their prices to the nearest nickel (which could have interesting consequences…imagine the guides that’ll pop up telling people what things are cheaper to buy using debit/credit and which are cheaper using cash).
Anyway, I thought this was pretty interesting news. It makes me think about Canada’s switch from paper $1 and $2 to coin versions. Are the coins cheaper to produce than the bills? Also, were the bills called loonies and toonies, or is that just the coins? I don’t remember if the bills had loons on them. SO MANY QUESTIONS, CANADA, JEEZ.
Eigenblogger 
If I ran the mint, or in a weird SimCity sort of world, I think I would just increase the value of the penny to a nickel, overnight. Phase out the original nickel, not the penny.
Let’s say you have a hundred million pennies outstanding ($1m). You’d immediately have a cash injection into your economy of $4m, but in increments so small inflation wouldn’t be an issue… what are you going to do, start hoarding heavy coins? Assuming nickels cost more than pennies to produce (2.5 cents, let’s say) you’d actually make a profit, too, because your new price for a nickel is 1.6 cents.
I mean, either way you’ve got the weight of a coin. You just get instant results this way.
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Hm, that’s a really interesting solution. Unfortunately, I think nickels cost more than their face value to produce, too (but I’m not sure).
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