Free Republic

Grandpa Brooks counted his pennies. He owned a little pharmacy in Chicago and he liked to sift through the till, hunting for interesting coins. Wheat pennies. Indian head pennies. Buffalo nickels. The steel pennies they minted during World War II when America needed its copper for ammunition.

It can arbitrate disputes with a flip, add shine to DIY art projects and keep fingernails clean when scratching a lotto ticket. But when it comes to commerce, it’s become so useless that even life-long cent collectors have begun cutting losses. “I've thrown pennies in the trash. Sometimes they’re in horrible condition. They’ve been out in the rain or buried in the dirt or corroded, or they're just damn ugly,” Dan Norris, owner of D&J Coins in Sheridan, told Cowboy State Daily. “I could take it to the bank and redeem it – but they’re pennies.” Norris was expressing one...

President Donald Trump directed the Treasury Department to cease minting pennies. The penny has been circulating for 233 years, first established in 1792. Trump has been against the creation of a CBDC, but this move is clearly one massive step illustrating the long-term trend of inflation. More than that, the penny was the descendant of the Roman Denarius, and its origin stretches back to the Punic Wars of the Roman Republic when the Denarius first appeared. Before that, Rome’s coinage complied with the Greek monetary standard. The cost of the Punic Wars was highly inflationary, and the Romans issued the...

In a move potentially foretold by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), it seems the U.S. could be on the verge of ending penny production. President Donald Trump on Sunday said that he had asked the Treasury Department to stop minting new pennies, calling them “wasteful.” “For far too long the United States has minted pennies which literally cost us more than 2 cents. This is so wasteful! I have instructed my Secretary of the US Treasury to stop producing new pennies. Let’s rip the waste out of our great nations budget, even if it’s a penny at a time,”...

Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency is targeting one of the federal government’s most notorious examples of waste: the penny. Getting rid of the penny would be an early test of DOGE’s influence: Could it help eliminate a piece of government inefficiency that has survived decades of reform attempts? On Tuesday, DOGE’s account on X highlighted the coin’s mounting costs: In fiscal year 2023, taxpayers spent more than $179 million producing over 4.5 billion pennies, with each coin costing more than three cents to make. Despite bipartisan recognition of the penny’s costs since at least the 1970s, efforts to phase...

For almost 20 years now, the physical act of making some of our money has weirdly been a money-loser for the United States Mint. Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) are apparently looking to undo that paradox. Stop making cents In one of the first DOGE posts on X after the department was established, it highlighted the well-known oddity that each individual penny costs more than 3 cents to make and distribute. It also wrongly claimed that producing the coin set US taxpayers back more than $179 million in FY23. (That figure was the loss of minting...

For far too long the United States has minted pennies which literally cost us more than 2 cents. This is so wasteful! I have instructed my Secretary of the US Treasury to stop producing new pennies. Let's rip the waste out of our great nations budget, even if it's a penny at a time.

Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has a new target to cut down costs: the US penny. DOGE said on X that the penny costs over 3 cents to make and cost US taxpayers over $179 million in the 2023 fiscal year. “The Mint produced over 4.5 billion pennies in FY2023, around 40% of the 11.4 billion coins for circulation produced,” the post read in part. The US Mint in 2023 reported it circulated around 4.1 billion pennies. In fiscal year 2024, the US Mint said in its annual report that the US penny costs about 3.7 cents to produce...

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."