On May 11, a new law went into effect in Florida, “allowing” businesses to round the amounts charged for cash purchases to the nearest nickel.

Really? Nothing more important than this for our masters in Tallahassee to spend their time on?

Don’t get me wrong. The practice in question makes sense:

Last November, the US Mint stopped producing pennies for circulation. That seems like  a sound decision, since the cost of producing the one-cent coins came to nearly four cents each.

Perhaps the production cost could have been brought down by using different materials, but after more than a century of fiat currency inflation, we’re well past the point where most people can be bothered to pick a stray penny up off the sidewalk anyway.

When I was a kid, one could put a penny in a machine and get a gumball, or buy a piece of “penny candy” at the store counter. According to my handy-dandy AI assistant, those treats now cost anywhere from a nickel to a quarter each.

Because new pennies aren’t being minted (and many Americans are socking the pennies they have away as collector items), the retail sector is experiencing a penny “shortage.”  If your purchase comes to $1.98 or $5.01, and you’re paying in cash rather than with a debit card, there may not be pennies in the till to make correct change.

So, rounding. Under the Florida law, retailers can round cash purchases up or down (whichever is closest) to make that $1.98 into two dollars even, or that $5.01 into $5.00.

Very nice, very neat, and goodbye to those “take a penny, leave a penny” trays on convenience store counters. While retailers MIGHT game their pricing to make individual items come in at the “round up” point, most people don’t buy just one item anyway, so I doubt we’ll see a general price increase out of it.

But why on Earth would merchants need a law to “allow” this?

Early on, it seems reasonable for stores to put up signs notifying customers that their cash purchases will be rounded up or down to the “nearest nickel.” Customers would be free to either accept those terms or to shop elsewhere.

Over time, it would just become accepted practice, like handing over $6.00 for a gallon of gas even though the price is technically only $5.999 per gallon (I’m pricing in the likely continuing impact of the Iran fiasco).

A law “allowing” this kind of obvious, transparent, and not dishonest practice isn’t just useless, it’s damaging.

Even when framed as “voluntary” — as this one is –unnecessary laws “allowing” behaviors already unquestionably “allowed” (by common sense and conventional morality) tend to nudge  the public toward an “everything not required is forbidden” mindset in which we instinctively seek permission from our rulers for every action, trivial or momentous.

And that mindset widely adopted, leads us inexorably toward Mussolini’s definition of fascism: “All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.”

But with rounding, my two cents come to nought, don’t they?

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

Senate Republicans, the Associated Press reports, plan to give the Secret Service $1 billion for “security upgrades” to president Donald Trump’s  (supposedly $400 million, supposedly donation-funded) White House ballroom project.

After an assassination attempt outside the Washington Hilton ballroom hosting the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in April, Republicans began boosting the ballroom itself as a presidential safety solution.

Every time the president ventures forth to environments inhabited or surrounded by the hoi polloi, they point out, the Secret Service has to create bespoke environments within otherwise open facilities  to ensure that he’s not shot at, yelled at, glared at, or annoyed. Better to keep him in a facility that’s controlled 24/7 for his safety and convenience.

That’s fair, and it occurs to me that, done rightly, adding a secure ballroom to the White House could benefit not just presidential security but public convenience. My proposal:

Build the ballroom. Make it, and the White House grounds, as secure as humanly possible. If necessary, enlarge the White House grounds (perhaps by incorporating Lafayette Park) to make room for more amenities. We want future presidents to be comfortable, because the other half of the deal is:

On January 20 of the year following his or her election, immediately following the  inauguration ceremony, each new president enters the White House grounds, and does not leave until, four years later, he or she leaves for home or to travel over to Capitol Hill for re-inauguration.

Don’t make it a suggestion. Make it a law.

The president would be very safe. Instead of constantly navigating, analyzing, and securing new environments, the Secret Service could focus on a layout they knew like the backs of their hands and could pre-approve and carefully monitor any changes to. No security system is impenetrable, but this one would be a very hard target.

As for the public, we’d no longer be inconvenienced by having the president wander around the country at will and at our expense, disrupting every community he or she visits.

No more airport/airspace closures for Air Force One.

No more roads and streets shut down for presidential motorcades.

No more swarms of Secret Service agents and mobs of other law enforcement agents sealing off golf course, fairgrounds, universities, etc. because The Very Special Important Person is going to be there.

There’s nothing a president HAS to do that requires him or her to leave 1600 Pennsylvania NW and its attached grounds.

The chief executive’s job is to sign or veto bills (which can be done at the Oval Office desk), supervise various departments (whose heads can come to the White House for cabinet meetings, etc.), negotiate treaties (such negotiations are usually handled by envoys, but other heads of state, etc. could visit the White House as necessary), and occasionally report to Congress on the “State of the Union” (which can be, and for many years was,  done via  written report rather than by personal visit to a joint session of Congress).

Safer president, less public inconvenience, and much cheaper. It’s a win-win.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

“We won’t be signing off until the world ends,” Ted Turner said in 1980, just before the launch of his latest media venture. “We’ll be on, and we will cover the end of the world, live, and that will be our last event.”

Turner died on May 6 at 87. The world hasn’t ended yet, nor has his project, Cable News Network, but the latter changed the former in a big way.

If you’re too young to remember the pre-CNN era, trying to describe it feels like pulling a fish out of water and showing it a non-aquatic landscape:

On television, “the news” was generally broadcast twice a day, morning and evening, in half-hour local and half-hour national/world shows. Morning network shows included short news segments between entertainment content. Truly earth-shaking events might call for “SPECIAL BULLETIN” interruptions.

Radio stations often carried very short “top of the hour” news updates between their other programming, but prior to CNN Radio (launched at the same time as CNN’s cable television news channel) there were no “24-hour news” stations.

About half of the American population cared enough about “the news” to subscribe to a daily newspaper, delivered to their front porches each morning or evening. Such newspapers — apart from a few big-city publications — tended to be very local in focus, with perhaps a smattering of national stories from wire services like Associated Press and United Press International. USA Today, the first really intentionally “national” newspaper, launched two years after CNN.

At the time of CNN’s launch, about one in five US households subscribed to cable television. Three years later, that number had doubled and eventually approached 90% (streaming options have dragged it down, but the percentage remains higher than in pre-CNN days).

Since CNN’s launch, “the news” has gone from short daily feeds covering pre-deadline events to 24/7/365 real-time coverage of far more things, in far more detail, by numerous and varied outlets.

In theory, that should make the public much better informed than we used to be. We can know more OF what’s happened, and know more ABOUT what’s happened.

In reality, I’m not sure our attention to important facts about important events has really increased.

The 24-hour news environment seems far richer in sensationalism, pearl-clutching, and outrage bait than in useful information about the important stuff.

Former football star leads police on low-speed chase in a Bronco.

One movie star’s divorcing another movie star and it’s getting ugly.

Someone said a bad word on a hot mic.

That’s not Ted Turner’s fault. It’s our fault. CNN and its media children and grandchildren give us what we want to watch, because that’s how businesses make money.

That they’ll keep showing us whatever keeps us watching isn’t news.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY