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Goodbye Penny?
When you see a penny on the ground, do you stop and pick it up? If so, are you picking it up for good luck, or because you think it’s worth something? Regardless, there is a growing movement to get rid of the penny. David Owen#8217;s new piece in the New Yorker, “Penny Dreadful: They’re horrid and useless. Why do pennies persist?,” explores the idea of why we still have the penny.
One of the most telling reasons to get rid of the penny is the cost of creating it. Yes, it costs more to make a penny, than a penny is actually worth. How much? The process of “producing a penny now costs about 1.7 cents.” There are problems with just getting rid of the penny, however. Aside from issues of whether sales should be rounded up or down and people who simply like the penny, there is also the fact that
eliminating pennies would increase our reliance on nickels, which now cost almost ten cents to manufacture and so generate even more negative seigniorage, per coin, than pennies do.
Ouch!
Aside from discussing the issue of what to do with the penny, the article also looks briefly at the history of coins in the US:
The first U.S. coins, produced that year, were silver “half dismes,” or half-dimes. They were worth a twentieth of a dollar and may have been manufactured, at least in part, from silverware donated by President and Mrs. Washington. The first U.S. coins to circulate widely were probably one-cent pieces struck in 1792 or 1793. They were made of pure copper, and were slightly larger in diameter than a Sacagawea dollar and about half again as heavy. The first Lincoln cent was minted in 1909, on the hundredth anniversary of Lincoln’s birth. It replaced the Indian-head cent, and was the first circulating American coin to be stamped with the likeness of a real, identifiable person. It was made of bronze and weighed about twenty-five per cent more than the cent we use today.
For more, and to find out the potential fate of even the nickel, go read the whole thing: “Penny Dreadful: They’re horrid and useless. Why do pennies persist?.”
For more:
— Penny Foolish by David Margolick - New York Times
— The Composition of the Cent - US Mint
— United States Mint Moves to Limit Exportation & Melting of Coins - US Mint
— Wikipedia’s US Penny page
— michael | March 26, 2008 04:47 PM | Random bits
