Free Republic

Ukraine’s First Lady’s message to Britons facing crippling energy bill hikes and a cost of living crisis is that while they might be “counting pennies”, her county is counting casualties. “There is no comparison to the suffering of people here, but at home in the United Kingdom, as you acknowledge, people are facing very painful choices because of the soaring cost of energy that’s going to make things very tough for people,” said BBC presenter Laura Kuenssberg in an interview with President Volodymyr Zelensky’s wife, First Lady Olena Zelenska.

Just this past weekend, ten 100-year-old pennies sold for a whopping $1.1 million at an auction held by an Irvine-based auction house. Now that is a good return on investment. The coins were sold Sunday night during an auction by GreatCollections. “The ten pennies were specially struck proof coins made for collectors by the United States Mint in Philadelphia in the early years of the Lincoln cents. All are still in pristine, mint red condition and sold for a combined total of $1,113,174,” the auction house said. This Lincoln penny, specially made by the United States Mint in Philadelphia in...

Nielsen said the pyramid took him exactly three years to assemble and weighs 6,360 pounds. He said the pyramid is composed of 93,665 small stacks of 11 pennies. The base of the structure is 65 stacks long and 65 stacks wide. "The way I built it, I take 11 pennies; I made a little stack, and I just place them on the ground; there is no glue, no adhesives or anything like that, and you just kind of free stack them on top of each other, and I go up consistently," Nielsen told The Arizona Republic. He said the world...

The 300,000 pennies the Cedar Bluff, Virginia man took to the DMV Wednesday morning to pay sales tax on two new cars weighed in at 1,600 pounds. A mature Holstein cow weighs about 1,500 pounds. See, Stafford had a bone to pick with the DMV. It wasn’t about agonizingly long lines or a bad picture on his driver’s license: It came down to 10 phone numbers. And Stafford ended up filing three lawsuits and spending at least $1,005 to give the DMV his 2 cents. One might feel bad for the Lebanon DMV employees, who chose to count the coins...

I see on the packaging that these are meant for be for educational use. Well, for those who need a math tutor that comes to 3.49 cents for every FAKE penny.What a freakin' joke. It would be cheaper for teachers to just give their students real money to count with.

We'd been looking up options and were thinking about being green when I said we should just tile the floor in pennies," Lange, a entrepreneur and self-described design freak, says. Belden wasn't completely on board at first, but before she could put her two cents in, the project off and running. "I came home one day and found a small corner was done, so I thought 'I guess we're doing it,'" she recalled. Thus began four months of painstaking work they dubbed "pennying," which involves laying down a special glue that acts like grout and individually placing the pennies heads...

The U.S. is following Canada's footsteps regarding the production of pennies and nickels. According to U.S. Treasury Secretary Tim Giethner, our U.S. Mint intends to remove the penny and nickel coins from circulation beginning early in January 2013.

The federal budget is guaranteed to leave Canadians penniless — literally. Among the victims of cutbacks outlined by Finance Minister Jim Flaherty in the government's 2012 federal budget on Thursday is Canada's one-cent coin. Citing low purchasing power and rising production costs, the government has decided to phase the penny out of existence starting this fall, when the Royal Canadian Mint will stop distributing the one-cent coin to financial institutions. Over time, that will lead to the penny effectively becoming extinct, although the government noted on Thursday that one-cent coins will always be accepted in cash transactions for as long...

If Laws Change, 'Penny Hoarders' Could Cash In On Thousands Of Dollars By NEAL KARLINSKY and MARY-ROSE ABRAHAM ABC News – Fri, Dec 2, 2011If Laws Change, 'Penny Hoarders' Could Cash in on Thousands of Dollars (ABC News … Joe Henry is on a first name basis with bank tellers across his hometown of Medford, Ore., scouring 15 banks a week with one thing on his mind: pennies. Henry is often seen toting around bags of pennies, some he buys, others he changes back in for cash, which seems a little strange at first. He's not a collector, he is...

A Stack of 1 Trillion Pennies: 5 Ways to Visualize Our $13 Trillion National DebtBy Meredith Margrave Wednesday, June 30, 2010 $13 trillion. That's roughly the current size of the U.S. national debt. And it continues to grow every second. **SNIP** 4) The 50 Richest People in the Room Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, the entire Walton family -- these are just a few of the names that top Forbes' annual report on the richest people in the world. Yet none of them will ever be worth a trillion dollars. In fact, if you put the 50 richest billionaires in a...

This image shows how big a block of pennies would be for 10 trillion dollars. Unfortunately the projected deficit under Obamacare would (or will be) 12 Trillion. Those first 2 buildings on the left are the Sears Tower and the Empire State Buiding.     value  $10,000,670,883,840.00(Ten trillion, six hundred seventy million, eight hundredeighty-three thousand, eight hundred and forty dollarsand zero cents) width  2,730 feet height  2,730 feet thickness  2,730 feet total weight  3,125,000,000 tons height stacked  986,426,768 Miles area (laid flat)  89,675,161 acres You could cover about 95% of California with a single layer of pennies for this amount.

The minting of 4 new Lincoln cents has got the anti-penny crowd in an uproar - complete with civil disobedience calling for the end of penny use. They're vexed at the "zinc lobby."

How much do you suppose it costs the U.S. Mint to produce a penny? Let me tell you--with a deeply self-satisfied howl of execration--almost 2 cents. This little brown item of pocket clutter costs twice as much to make as it's worth, and it isn't worth anything. A penny will not buy a penny postcard or a penny whistle or a single piece of penny candy. It will not even, if you're managing the U.S. Mint, buy a penny. The problem is the cost of zinc, which is what a "copper" is actually made of. For the past 25 years...

U.S.’s dilemma: It costs 1.7 cents to make a penny Maker of zinc blanks fear end of the coin By Dibya Sarkar - ASSOCIATED PRESS Updated: 08/19/07 7:18 AM WASHINGTON — The U.S. penny is not what it appears to be, and some in Congress would like to see it change further, if not disappear entirely. Because of a surge in the price of copper, the U.S. Mint decided 25 years ago to manufacture the coins almost entirely with zinc, save for the coating on which Abraham Lincoln’s profile is engraved. Now, the fate of the penny is up in...

PLYMOUTH, Mass. (July 2) - In this village settled by thrifty Pilgrims, you can still buy penny candy for a penny, but tourist Alan Ferguson doubts he'll be able to dig any 1-cent pieces out of his pockets. He rarely carries pennies because "they take up a lot of room for how much value they have." Instead, like so many other Americans, he dumps his pennies into a bucket back home in Sarasota, Fla. Pity the poor penny! It packs so little value that merry kids chuck pennies into the fountain near the candy store, just to watch them splash...

(AP) PLYMOUTH, Mass. -- In this village settled by thrifty Pilgrims, you can still buy penny candy for a penny, but tourist Alan Ferguson doubts he'll be able to dig any 1-cent pieces out of his pockets. He rarely carries pennies because "they take up a lot of room for how much value they have." Instead, like so many other Americans, he dumps his pennies into a bucket back home in Sarasota, Fla. Pity the poor penny! It packs so little value that merry kids chuck pennies into the fountain near the candy store, just to watch them splash...

KINGSTON, Ontario, Nov. 23 (UPI) -- A Canadian retiree, angry because his credit card payments are processed south of the border, got even by paying his bill a few pennies at a time. Don Rogers of Kingston, Ontario, also hopes that his massive credit card statement will land him in the Guinness Book of World Records. He paid the bill on line in a total of 985 separate payments. What set Rogers off is the idea of his credit card statements being available to U.S. authorities under the Patriot Act. "Us retired guys are the most dangerous, because we have...

A man who tried to get even by paying a traffic ticket with $120 in pennies got upstaged by a North Dakota judge who made him stay until they were counted. Robert John Zukowski brought a garbage can full of about 12,000 pennies to Clay County District Court to pay his fine for speeding, the Fargo Forum reported. Court Administrator Jan Crossette lugged the bucket of change to a bank, which used a machine to count the money and gave her $120 in bills...

A Penny Saved Isn't Always a Penny Earned LOS ANGELES (AP) — A man is trying to get rid of his pennies — all 1 million of them. Ron England bet his brother 30 years ago that he could save a million pennies in exchange for a dinner in Paris. And he did, eventually stacking up 20,000 rolls that fill 13 boxes in his garage. Now that he's moving, England wants to cash in the $10,000 in coppers, which weigh 3.6 tons, but is having a tough time finding someone who will take them without a price. "I've been working...

David Bowser for The New York TimesRobert Massengale, enjoying his fame as the money launderer of Lubbock, Tex., amid the tons of mud-caked pennies that he is cleaning. UBBOCK, Tex., Feb. 13 — The tractor-trailer was traveling from the United States Mint in Denver to a branch of the Federal Reserve in San Antonio when it crashed last October on a desolate stretch of highway in West Texas. Patrol officers found a grisly scene, and something else: 7.6 million pennies. The newly minted 2001D pennies had fallen from the truck and spread over a roadside ditch like an orange ...