Another thing to note is that since the publication of this paper, the use of credit and debit cards as well as online payments have dramatically risen, but these modes of payment and financial services are less available to poor and unbanked individuals, making this regressive tax even more regressive if items purchased by check,credit or debit card wouldn't require rounding. how do i download a paper to print or read on another device? This is no longer true. Thanks to rising metal prices, since 2006 the US mint has had to spend more money to produce and distribute both nickels and pennies than the coins are actually worth. In 2016, according to a report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office, it costs 1.7 cents to make a penny and 8 cents to make a nickel. Therefore, the US government is not making profits from making and distributing pennies and this argument cannot be used. The U.S. convenience store industry, with more than 154,000 stores nationwide selling fuel, food and merchandise, serves 160 million customers daily— half of the U.S. population—and has sales that are 10.8% of total U.S. retail and food service sales. NACS has 2,100 retailer and 1,750 supplier members from more than 50 countries and was founded on August 14, 1961. A regressive tax is one where the tax rate decreases as the amount subject to taxation increases. Regressive describes a distribution effect on income or expenditure and in terms of individual income and wealth, a regressive tax imposes a greater burden (relative to resources) on the poor than on the rich: there is an inverse relationship between the tax rate and the taxpayer's ability to pay, as measured by assets, consumption, or income. In this case, removing the penny, the smallest denomination of currency, would affect poorer people disproportionally more, so it is regressive. When the New York Stock Exchange was founded in March 1817, they based their pricing system on the Spanish trading system. Over 400 years ago, Spanish traders would use a currency of Spanish gold doubloons for trade that they would divide into two, four and eight pieces that they would count on their fingers. They would not use their thumbs for counting, so Spanish gold doubloons had a base of eight with the smallest denomination 1/8. Instead of a base of eight, the New York Stock exchanged started with a base of sixteen and the smallest denomination was 1/16th. On April 9th, 2001, the SEC ordered all US stock markets to switch to a decimal system. An interesting development in the way prices are quoted is the SEC's tick pilot program, which increases the tick size (smallest price variation allowed) from 1 cent to 5 cents, with some restrictions across different securities. The goal of the program is to determine if liquidity in low volume equities can be improved by increasing the incentive for market makers to provide quotes. The logic here is that when the smallest possible spread is five cents, not one cent, market makers are happier because they can buy at the lower price and sell at the higher one, and make a five cent profit (assuming the price doesn't change). The program finished putting all 800 or so securities into the program as of late October and we're still waiting on preliminary research into results. Edit: If you're interested in learning more about tick size, Larry Harris had an excellent paper in 1994 about minimum price variation. According to a more recent 2015 FDIC National Survey of Unbanked and Underbanked households, 7.0 percent of households in the United States were unbanked in 2015. This proportion represents approximately 9.0 million households. An additional 19.9 percent of U.S. households (24.5 million) were underbanked, meaning that the household had a checking or savings account but also obtained financial products and services outside of the banking system.