Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson hates the penny because it is a worthless dingleberry of a coin. In an interview sure to have kids thinking they know enough to run the Mint, Paulson simplistically noted: “The penny is worth less than any other currency.” Don’t sing the penny’s swan song just yet.
…he quickly added that he didn’t think it was “politically doable” to eliminate the one-cent coin and it wasn’t something he planned to tackle in the final year of the Bush administration.
Great, add the penny to the slate of issues over which the parties disagree. Put it right next to war spending and social security.
Is the penny the most useless coin ever, or an indispensable cog in our $.99 economy? Vote in our poll, after the jump.
Treasury Secretary Wants to Dump Pennies [AP]
PREVIOUSLY: Just Fucking Die Already, U.S. Penny
(Photo: Getty)
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I work in retail and the two coins we use the most are pennies and quarters (most prices end in 9 or 0 and taxable items are taxed at 6%). Dimes are our most useless coin. We can go days with no loose dimes in the register with no problems.
Let’s just get rid of money altogether and make love all the time.
I miss living in Australia, with their rounding, incorporated taxes (no getting to the register and realizing your total is $5 more than you’d been doing in the mental math), and lack of pennies. Oh, and one and two dollar coins. Those were AWESOME.
Not only do I think we should keep the penny, but I think we should have a .1 cent piece…hey, gas stations tack on 9/10 of a cent onto every gallon of gas, I want my !@#$$! 1/10 of a cent back on every gallon of gas I’ve ever purchased.
Besides, if they got rid of the penny, I would no longer be able to put my 2¢ in.
@Grrrrrrrrr: You are on to a good point. That if the penny was eliminated, it would change the language for the poorer, and to serve a fad.
A penny saved, would no longer be a penny earned
You won’t have good luck if you see a penny and pick it up
You won’t be in for a penny if your in for a pound.
This debate has raged at different points in history, most recently in the UK when there was a fight over whether to ditch the pound (a currency the country had since the 8th century) to go to the Euro. The EU is the poorer for having lost its currencies.
In America this debate occurred I believe around 1780–1800, although then it was a bit of an advance. There were three currencies–the British dollar which was often a restamped Spanish real–which was about one ounce of silver. The Spanish real, and then various state coins. Paper money came and went but was not worth what it was printed on.
Around this time two bits became a quarter dollar, well before a shave and a haircut. Silver coins were chopped up into eight parts (pieces of eight) to pay for smaller items.
You will still see Spanish Reals which have chop marks in them. These coins circulated in Asia where traders would chop out a little piece of the coin to see if it was real silver.
But I digress–dumping the penny is a dumb idea subject to fads and the variable price of metal.
It is not a matter of the peeny being completely useless, but more of a matter of it being made of a material that costs far too much.
@dray05:
I beg to differ, but when did this government of our really worry about losing $18.3 million, when they are building a ¼ BILLION dollar bridge that would connect Ketchikan, Alaska, to an offshore island where only 50 people live.
How about a national recall of all pennies? As many pennies as people have sitting in jars and drawers and such, once back in circulation, there should be plenty to keep using them without having to make more.
Our monetary systm is screwed up. The reason we have both dollar coins and dollar bills is because Sens. Kennedy and Kerry want to keep Crane Paper in business. The Virginia delegation vehemently opposes any action that would take Jefferson off the nickel.
In the meantime, we Americans prefer dollar bills so all the dollar coins that are minted annually go to South America as part of our aid program.
I’m getting a headache just thinking about it…
“The penny costs more to produce than it’s worth.” And that money is gone forever? It doesn’t matter what a form of currency costs to produce, because unless we go to a system where a $5 coin is made of $5 worth of metal, and you can cut it up get change, the cost of the currency has no bearing on what it represents. The penny is a token of exchange. The money spent producing feeds the families of mint workers and copper miners and others. So, that argument is, to me, completely pointless.
Just another way to tax the people. Get rid of the penny now, then the nickel, after that the dime; and if no one says anything they can move up to the eliminating the quarter and eventually all coins. Nothing will ever be the same. No more 1.25, 1.50, 1.98, or anyting else in between. We’d have to round everything up to a dollar, unless they feel the dollar is obsolete as well. What then? Will $5.00 become the minimum cost of everything? Only in America.
During my tour in England, the USAF Exchange on base actually did NOT use pennies, and you know what. No one complained about the “rounding” off, prices were still rung up as 19.23, and that equated to a cost of 19.25, if it was 19.22, the consumer would pay 19.20.
I guess when you’re in the military, the little things like a penny don’t matter, it’s just living for the next day that makes you happy. Our country is so messed up when they sweat this….take the penny out already, it’s a drain on the economy.
Help! Help! Lincoln is drowning in rust!
After living in Australia for 6 months I have learned to hate the penny. It is not nearly as inconvenient as people might think. If I recall correctly on cash transactions you just round to the nearest 5 cent piece, but on credict/debit transactions you still pay to the penny.
Actually, I think prices might DROP a little for consumers, although in the long run it won’t matter much.
Here’s why: Retails price items at $9.99 because it sounds better than $10, right? Well, $9.95 sounds better than $10, too. So the idea that everything will automatically cost more is unlikely.
Some things will round up, others down. Overall the effect will be negligible to consumers, but the savings overall will be large.
I don’t think I could get used to saying a “nickel for your thoughts”.
First it was Woolworth, then Sears, now Pennys. There’s no doubt about it now, we’re in one of them secessions!!!
@richtaur: why not at least drop them next to the garbage so someone else can pick them up? It’s utter bullshit to completely waste a penny. All you’re doing is sending it to sit in a landfill. If you at least drop it on the ground, someone else can use it.
The penny truly is worthless. Many stores I go to will round change to the nearest nickel just so they don’t have to deal with pennies. I’ve seen kids chucking pennies at cars. That’s how worthless they are.
If you actually melted down all your pennies and sold the copper that resulted, you would get more than you could by changing in the pennies at a bank. When a coin gets to that point, there’s no point in making more of them.
@richtaur: I saw someone do this as well. I almost laughed, but then realized that yes, they are that worthless.
Lose the penny! Like countless people have already posted here, I can attest too, that when you are stationed overseas, you don’t use pennies (too expensive to ship) and everything functioned fine, the world didn’t collapse, money didn’t devalue, and no, we didn’t want to axe the nickel next.
@graffiksguru:
Again, there aren’t any sales taxes to be paid at overseas base exchanges!
Pennies are required for sales taxes.
Funny that everyone’s focused only on the penny, when in fact, the nickel also costs more to produce than its face value.
According to [www.coinflation.com], the metal content of the nickel is 7.3 cents and I’m sure it costs even more than that to produce.
@r0ck Lincoln was a war criminal that presided over the deaths of over half a million Americans. I applaud him for ridding the country of slavery, I condemn him for how he did it. Over a hundred other countries eliminated slavery without a civil war.
This problem is not rooted in the price of copper or manufacturing or any other “Price.” This crisis is rooted in the value of the dollar. The dollar is worth roughly 2% of its gold standard value. The value of copper scales to the value of gold. If your dollar was worth $980/20 (Price of an oz. in $ divided by 20), your penny would be worth about 50 cents, which is less than the manufacturing cost of a penny. Much less.
I vote for a 3 cent coin. It’s about bloody time. 1c, 2c and 5c have always had all the fun.
(Sorry 4c, I just don’t think you’re ready yet.)
When I receive pennies as change, they get tossed on the ground in the parking lot.
I’m in the today it’s the penny tomorrow it’s the nickel crowd. You guys are such haters…
Anyway, I think that there needs to be a collect your pennies and turn em in for other cash drive so that new pennies are no longer stamped out. There’s gotta be enough pennies to go around if people would stop collecting them for years and years until they can make the news by buying a car or something with them.
So I’m an American living in Santiago, Chile, and the Chilean Peso is worth 1/5 of a penny. Most things are rounded to the nearest 50, but some places still go to the nearest peso. We have coins for the 1 peso, 5, 10, 50, 100, and 500 peso; and bills for the 1000, 2000, 5000, 10000, and 20000 pesos.