The E-Sylum:  Volume 9, Number 51, December 17, 2006, Article 8

IS MINT's BAN ON COIN MELTING ENFORCABLE?

Dick Johnson writes: "On Thursday (December 14, 2006) the U.S. Mint
issued an interim ruling that U.S. coins cannot be melted. Try telling
that to the Secret Service. Such a ruling is, in my opinion,
unenforcable. "Look out, here come the penny police!"

"The coins in your possession are your property. You can do with them
what you wish -- toss them in glass jars, lay them on railroad tracks
for trains to run over, run them thru elongating machines, engrave
hobos on the reverse, even counterstamp with letters or your name.

"Or you can spend them. That is where the government has control over
coins in circulation -- not when they are your property -- they control
coins as commerce. If you put them back in circulation as U.S. money
the government can have some legal action over the coins at this point.

"If you melt the coins you cannot spend them. Thus this ruling has
little or no effect. It is a gray area.

"Mint officials are frightened of mass melting of cents and nickels.
And so they should be. Worse yet, is the possibility of a metal-starved
country like China buying up all the low denomination coins, shipping
them all to Asia to melting for the retrievable copper, zinc and nickel.

"This U.S. Mint ruling is like treating the symptoms instead of the
disease. The "disease" in this case is the rising economy of America.
And that is a good thing. Our economy is advancing so rapidly that our
two lowest coin denominations have little purchasing power that the cost
of their metal plus the cost of manufacture are greater than the economic
value of their denominations.

"I outlined the solution to this problem in The E-Sylum ten weeks back.
Don't melt anything. Keep all the coins circulating. Just revalue all
cents and nickels to 10-cent value. This can be done by Treasury
Secretary's wave of his pen! He should rule that on a designated
Saturday midnight all cents and nickels are revalued.  Problem solved.
See my E-Sylum article:

DICK JOHNSON's DRAMATIC SOLUTION TO THE RISING COST OF CENTS
esylum_v09n39a13.html

If you wish to see Thursday's news article from ABC
(quoting Dave Ganz) click on: Full Story "

  Wayne Homren, Editor

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