The American Penny Needs to Die

By Mark Lazar

The production of the penny starts in the First US Mint that was founded in 1792, which produced these one-cent coins along with other coins, like the quarter, dime, half dime, and half cent. The pennies were made of 100% copper, but two forces were working to stop this, ensuring this would not remain: the buying price of copper, which went up, and the worth of the penny, which went down.

                             
This forced the US Mint to change the makeup of the penny to 95% zinc and 5% copper, but because of this, the worth of copper in older pennies increased over 1 cent, so people began to melt pennies for profit. If the government was thinking logically, the story of the penny would have ended here, with the government seeing that pennies weren't worth making, and being satisfied that their citizens were melting them, seeing the benefit to the economy, and we could move on to the more efficient rounding system of countries like New Zealand or Canada. But, no. What did the government do? They made it illegal to melt US minted coins and they still continue to manufacture over 4 billion pennies each year.

The American penny needs to die, and here’s why.

Now look, removing the penny isn't as outlandish as it might seem, as this isn’t the first time a coin was removed from the US. The half-cent was eradicated because it was worth so little (just like the penny). Now just like the half-cent, you can’t buy anything with the penny, with most “cheap” items costing $1 - $2 dollars minimum today. In fact, one of the only things that you can use a penny for is Coinstar, a leech to the economy that could really be another article for itself. But my point here is that this isn't impossible and that it’s been done before, but I want to get into the why of the penny argument. Why should we kill the penny? Well let’s start.

When talking about removing the penny, a point commonly associated with the topic is the fact that the penny makes the US lose money because the amount of money spent to make pennies is not repaid in the amount of pennies made. It costs 1.8 cents to make one penny, which hurts our economy. According to a Quartz article, we lost 46 million dollars in 2006 from the production of pennies alone, and as we keep going forward to the future this will only increase.

Another point that people use to argue against the penny is the convenience of spare change. This argument can be used for spare change as a whole, but I want to focus on the penny’s role in spare change. Now, trading eventually led to the invention of bills, and bills were made to shorten the process of bartering. And, unlike other countries, our sales tax varies from 8-9% of the food or items we buy (unlike other countries which add ~20% to the cost to make the tax invisible).

Because the majority of people can’t do the sales tax times the cost of their food in their head, we can’t figure out how many pennies we need in advance, so, we either leave the spare change as a tip, or we stay in the shopping line like an inconsiderate jerk counting pennies, with most people who do the second option usually having nothing better to occupy their day, and either method causes an inconvenience to you, with you either losing money or having time taken from you.

But then, there is the argument as to why the penny should stay that is the most apparent in debates: the argument of patriotism. People for the penny argue that by removing the penny, we are discrediting the work of Lincoln, removing him from history, as the penny is his most well-known representation.

But even though the penny has Lincoln's face, and it might seems we are throwing him to the side, it won’t remove him from history. There is still his memorial in DC and the five dollar bill and our history books! Plus, by putting his face on the penny, it seems disrespectful due to the points above. Still think it’s unpatriotic? Even the Army and Air Force have agreed to not use pennies, using the rounding system which I will explain.

Other countries like Canada, Australia and New Zealand and more, have abolished the penny, rounding to the nearest 0.05 or 0.00. For example, $19.99 would be rounded to $20.00 and $19.92 would round to $19.95. These countries’ economies are not losing steam or traction and a large part of the world agrees that this is the best way to deal with spare change, all mentioned by this Quartz article.

So, in conclusion, the penny needs to die. It makes you and the government lose time and money, can be used on absolutely nothing, and isn’t worthy of staying on American soil. We have the power to remove the penny as it has already been done before with the half cent, and the aftermath of this has already been shown as successful with multiple countries.

The American penny needs to die, and this is why.