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| Probably the only real use anyone has ever found for a penny. |
If you have not heard, last week Canada decided to do away with the Canadian Penny. Yes, that means that Canada will no longer be minting anymore pennies. The Canadian Penny will still have legal monetary value (Making it approximately equal to 0.00998 American dollars), and can still be used in Canadian transactions by intention (and in American transactions by accident). The only difference is that our neighbors to the north will no longer be making new pennies, and as old pennies are collected they will be melted down and taken out of circulation. As far as consumers purchases, items in the store will continue to cost the usual amount, but when paying with money (not credit cards,) prices will be rounded up or down to the nearest 5-cents. Thus, .01, .02, .06, and .07 will be rounded down, while .03, .04, .08, and .09 cents will be rounded up. This means that sometimes the consumer will lose on the transaction but sometimes they will also win, and really is losing 2 cents of money worth the effort of having to carry around 2 pennies? More importantly, this move will save the Canadian government anywhere between 11 and 20 million (Canadian) dollars a year.
This leads me to an amazing revelation, We need to follow the example of Canada. (I know those words were probably as bitter for you to hear as they were for me to say, but it had to be said.) We need to get rid of the American Penny. I was first turned onto this issue after watching John Green (one of my favorite Youtube vloggers) who has been advocating the demise of pennies for years, and as the eldest Green brother usually is, he was right. Pennies do nothing to help the American economy. In fact, they are costing us money and time.
Last year, The United States minted 4.9 billion pennies, but the cost of minting a penny is 2.4 cents. (that's amazingly ridiculous!) Which means in order to mint 4.9 billion pennies (if your an economics major you would know that equals 49 million dollars) we had to spend 118 million dollars to do it. So every year America throws roughly 69 million dollars right down the drain. That's more convoluted than the plotline to Pirates of the Caribbean 3 (and just as much of a waste of money.) I will not even go into the nickle which costs roughly 11.5 cents to mint, but understand that it should be the next to go. However, in modern times the penny has also proved tremendously unnecessary. You cannot buy anything with a penny, nor can you do anything with a penny. Machines that were purposely designed to use coins (vending machines, parking meters, etc) do not even accept pennies. These small worthless pieces of copper only exist to jingle around in my pocket and be thrown into fountains.
There is also a standing theory that the penny is actually costing America much more than the few millions dollars it takes to subsidize their costs. According to theories of opportunity cost (The idea that time is money) time spent fooling around with pennies costs America over a billion dollars a year. In other words if your time is worth roughly $10.00 an hour and you spend two seconds sorting through pennies that means you have lost roughly 0.0056 dollars in the time it took you to find those pennies you needed. Now imagine you had ten people in front of you who had to get pennies or have pennies returned to them and it costs you 20 seconds, which would be 0.056 dollars wasted. Now imagine there was a little old lady who was paying only in pennies, and instead of making 10 dollars an hour you were a high-powered executive making $100 an hour or even $1,000 an hour. You can start to understand where the time loss adds up and the annoyance factor accumulates.
This brings me to my second point, I do not own a purse or wear a pocketbook. I am a man who is forced to keep all his change in his pockets. That means not only do I jingle when I walk, but there is a possibility I could exceed my encumbrance limit for my size category, (but who pays attention to those rules anyway?) Pennies cost us money, time, and effort. The only way pennies can be legitimately used to make money is if you fill a sock with them and mug a pedestrian while he is walking down the street. There is no logical argument to make in favor of pennies. Now lets examine the illogical argument that people make in favor of pennies.
The big group in support of our useless copper disks is the ironically named Americans for Common Cents. They have several arguments but the biggest come from their fear that doing away with the penny will mean all transactions will be rounded up, prices will skyrocket, and charities that depend on coin donations will suffer. The other reason people argue against doing away with the penny is mostly due to sentimentality and some kind of irrational belief that if we no longer have the penny everyone will forget who Abraham Lincoln is.
I understand that people grew up with the penny and you like it, and whatever, but that's the same rationale I use to stop myself from throwing away old shirts that are obviously past their prime. "Hey not my Incredible Hulk shirt! Sure the sleeve is ripped and its two sizes too small for me, but I like it, and maybe I'll use it again someday." We cannot be bogged down by sentimentality if it is costing us millions of dollars and thousands of collective hours a year. Additionally, all the economic based fear is nothing more than unfounded paranoia. There are a lot of countries that have done away with their pennies, Sweden, New Zealand, Australia, Israel, Netherlands, Singapore, Brazil, Argentina, and (oh yeah) US Military bases overseas who also no longer use pennies. Personally, I spent almost a year living and working in Australia, and I can testify that the economy worked just fine. Prices were rounded up or down and everyone went on with their lives. People still gave money to charities, the economy still remained stable, and I had one less coin to worry about in my pocket.
As far as Abraham Lincoln is concerned, he is our greatest President and Vampire Slayer. There is a lot of things named after him. (Oh and he is on that other thing... what do you call it... a 5 dollar bill.) If Lincoln were alive today I think he would be more insulted by the fact that his head is imprinted on a coin that only has a relative monetary value equal to about 1/26th of what it was worth in his day. "Forsooth, why is thine visage memorialized upon coinage that is of less worth than a flea's arse?" (I am also aware that I made Lincoln sound Shakespearean, but I'm the writer and that is just something you will have to learn to live with.) Truthfully, it would be cheaper if we did away with pennies and honored Lincoln by just building him a huge monument or carving his face into the side of a mountain... oh wait we already did both those things.
The real fact of the matter is that I do not see the American penny disappearing anytime in the near future. Despite that fact that revamping the American currency system is a logical and easy way for the government to save money, increase efficiency, and prove to the American people that congress can work toward positive and modern change, I still do not see it happening. After all when has the American government ever enacted a change that made sense. Unfortunately as humans, and as a nation, I am afraid we are too stuck in our ways to really make a shift of policy and thought on this large of a scale. I suppose it is just human nature to be afraid of change. (Get it?)
There is also a standing theory that the penny is actually costing America much more than the few millions dollars it takes to subsidize their costs. According to theories of opportunity cost (The idea that time is money) time spent fooling around with pennies costs America over a billion dollars a year. In other words if your time is worth roughly $10.00 an hour and you spend two seconds sorting through pennies that means you have lost roughly 0.0056 dollars in the time it took you to find those pennies you needed. Now imagine you had ten people in front of you who had to get pennies or have pennies returned to them and it costs you 20 seconds, which would be 0.056 dollars wasted. Now imagine there was a little old lady who was paying only in pennies, and instead of making 10 dollars an hour you were a high-powered executive making $100 an hour or even $1,000 an hour. You can start to understand where the time loss adds up and the annoyance factor accumulates.
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| If we are keeping it we might as well change the penny to better match the lunacy it represents... because with pennies we're all 'winning.' |
The big group in support of our useless copper disks is the ironically named Americans for Common Cents. They have several arguments but the biggest come from their fear that doing away with the penny will mean all transactions will be rounded up, prices will skyrocket, and charities that depend on coin donations will suffer. The other reason people argue against doing away with the penny is mostly due to sentimentality and some kind of irrational belief that if we no longer have the penny everyone will forget who Abraham Lincoln is.
I understand that people grew up with the penny and you like it, and whatever, but that's the same rationale I use to stop myself from throwing away old shirts that are obviously past their prime. "Hey not my Incredible Hulk shirt! Sure the sleeve is ripped and its two sizes too small for me, but I like it, and maybe I'll use it again someday." We cannot be bogged down by sentimentality if it is costing us millions of dollars and thousands of collective hours a year. Additionally, all the economic based fear is nothing more than unfounded paranoia. There are a lot of countries that have done away with their pennies, Sweden, New Zealand, Australia, Israel, Netherlands, Singapore, Brazil, Argentina, and (oh yeah) US Military bases overseas who also no longer use pennies. Personally, I spent almost a year living and working in Australia, and I can testify that the economy worked just fine. Prices were rounded up or down and everyone went on with their lives. People still gave money to charities, the economy still remained stable, and I had one less coin to worry about in my pocket.
As far as Abraham Lincoln is concerned, he is our greatest President and Vampire Slayer. There is a lot of things named after him. (Oh and he is on that other thing... what do you call it... a 5 dollar bill.) If Lincoln were alive today I think he would be more insulted by the fact that his head is imprinted on a coin that only has a relative monetary value equal to about 1/26th of what it was worth in his day. "Forsooth, why is thine visage memorialized upon coinage that is of less worth than a flea's arse?" (I am also aware that I made Lincoln sound Shakespearean, but I'm the writer and that is just something you will have to learn to live with.) Truthfully, it would be cheaper if we did away with pennies and honored Lincoln by just building him a huge monument or carving his face into the side of a mountain... oh wait we already did both those things.
The real fact of the matter is that I do not see the American penny disappearing anytime in the near future. Despite that fact that revamping the American currency system is a logical and easy way for the government to save money, increase efficiency, and prove to the American people that congress can work toward positive and modern change, I still do not see it happening. After all when has the American government ever enacted a change that made sense. Unfortunately as humans, and as a nation, I am afraid we are too stuck in our ways to really make a shift of policy and thought on this large of a scale. I suppose it is just human nature to be afraid of change. (Get it?)
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