Penniless (One-cent madness must end!)

National Review ^ | July 14, 2006 | Rich Lowry

[presidio9]

Giving money away for free is not behavior one expects from ordinary, rational Americans. But it’s something they do every day in massive numbers—that is if you consider the penny to be money.

At store counters around the country, people will leave pennies for the next customer, something they’d never do with a dime or quarter or any piece of currency they actually value. The poor, pathetic penny has become clutter in the nation’s pockets, the irritating detritus of cash transactions that inconveniently don’t end in a 5 or 0. Pennies sit in jars around the country, waiting in desuetude until their owners work up the energy to haul them to a bank or to a supermarket with a Coinstar kiosk where they can be exchanged for useful money.

Yes, we love Abraham Lincoln. We love our memories of buying candy with pennies when we were children. We love our traditional adages (“a penny for your thoughts,” etc.). But none of that should be enough anymore to inflict the penny on adults attempting to conduct cash transactions in an efficient way. Who will rid us of this nettlesome coin?

Perhaps Rep. Jim Kolbe (R., Ariz.), who will soon introduce legislation to move to a system that rounds cash transactions to the nearest 5 or 0. This would be a further step toward the penny’s obsolescence, or—as it should be thought of more accurately—toward stopping the madness.

The penny is no longer made from copper (too expensive), but merely has a copper coating over zinc, which is also now too expensive. It isn’t easy finding a substance worthless enough to make into pennies. It now costs 1.23 cents to make 1 cent. That means it will take 10.7 billion pennies

[freedomlover]

Does this mean I would never be able to put in my 2 cents?

[AmericanMade1776]

i don't like it, because then our taxes will be rounded up to the nearest nickle...

[Hildy]

I like that credit card that rounds up all your purchases and deposits it in your own account. I was going to look into getting that card. I guess I won't, now.

[Cobra64]

This has been my position for years. The Australians dumped the penny years ago.

[AmericanMade1776]

For instance if you have a sales tax of 6 cents on a dollar, they will round it up to 10 cents.

[GnL]

I would be in favor of this, if prices were rounded DOWN to the nearest 0 or 5. Fat chance.

[Petronski]

Delete the penny and the paper dollar. Print tons and tons of new paper twos, and release a new Lincoln dollar coin.

It's just too simple for bureaucrats to understand.

[reagan_fanatic]

One thing you can count on - it will never be rounded down to the next 5 or 0.

[AmericanMade1776]

what about the price of a stamp...it will go from 39 cents to 40 cents, then it will jump to 45 cents and 50 cents. no penny jumps

[longtermmemmory]

The penny needs to stay becaue the government doest not deserve the extra 4 cents to get to the nickle.

Next week outlaw the nickle, then the dime. then all coins.

[AmericanMade1776]

Besides..who we don't need to loose the penny, especially if you are using credit cards, it is all on paper anyway.

[itsamelman]

For instance if you have a sales tax of 6 cents on a dollar, they will round it up to 10 cents.

But if you bought something for $2, wouldn't they round down to $2.10?

[AmericanMade1776]

sometimes on the stock market stocks go up by a a few cents....I tell you I don't want to see the one hundreth of a dollar gone.

[AmericanMade1776]

I would rather pay 2.06, than 2.10...I tell you people are pretty damn lazy, if they can not deal with pennies.

[mysterio]

Another effort by government and corporations to raise the price of everything by four cents. No thanks.

[Lazamataz]

When cents are outlawed, only outlaws will have cents!

[cvq3842]

Interesting article!

One quibble I have is the oft-repeated claim that it costs over one cent to make a penny. Saying that the metal in a penny is intrinsically worth more than one cent is one thing. (That's why silver coinage was stopped in 1965 - people were melting the coins down for the silver.) And yes, every few years the composition of the penny is changed. Pull out a coin from, say, 1960 and compare it to one of today; you can tell the difference.

But if a penny costs a fraction of a cent, or twenty cents, to make doesn't really matter, if the USE society gets out of a penny is worth spending the money on the production costs. If it only cost 1/10 of a cent to produce a penny, but society didn't get 1/10 cent of "use" out of the penny, it would be a lousy bargain. If we need them, pennies are very durable and last for decades. So spending over a cent to produce each may not be a bad deal.

Getting rid of the penny would be OK in a cashless society, but I fear that everyone would just round transactions up to the nearest dollar. Is it really that much of a burden to carry them around?

Anyway, I'd rather see legislative energy put into a Reagan coin. People have suggested the dime, but the love of FDR (and his connection to the March of Dimes campaign) will not allow change. I say put Reagan on the $20 bill. Andrew Jackson didn't like the idea of a national bank anyway! i also have my moments when i think JFK has been on the half-dollar long enough. Then again, he was much more the kind of Democrat we could use today, on defense matters.

Yes, I collect coins. Forgive the rant.

I'm going off now to buy exactly one gallon of gas. Anyone have nine-tenths of a penny I could borrow? :)

[KarlInOhio]

sometimes on the stock market stocks go up by a a few cents....I tell you I don't want to see the one hundreth of a dollar gone.

They could just round off the total transaction, which would only matter if you are buying stocks not in multiples of five shares.

Until recently stocks went in jumps of 1/8 of a dollar.