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I was intent on writing an argument in favor of dumping America's copper runt, and still find merit in that point of view. However, what makes the penny worth merely...well, merely a penny? Is it the metal used? No - copper is a fine and respectable member of the non-animal, non-vegetable family. Is it the artistry or composition? I'm no critic of the visual arts, but I see nothing diminutive about Mr. Lincoln's rendering, certainly not as compared to those of Washington, F.D.R., or Jefferson on Honest Abe's coin cousins.

What, then, makes America's numismatic kid brother thus? It's not the penny's fault. It's policy. You heard me. With one stroke of the pen (okay, maybe the process is a bit more convoluted than that), "the man" can decide that the penny is now worth - gasp - TWO cents! What's the point? You double a penny and you still have a piddly two hundredths of a dollar. It's still less than half a nickel! Yeah, maybe so b-but... you can't just wave a magic wand and say "voila!", ye who had fifty cents now have the sum of one green-back! Where's the product, the WORK, that makes the money MEAN something? Isn't it all relative? Won't that just ultimately devalue our other money until our current equilibrium is returned? We either increase America's GDP by busting our collective butts the equivalent of the increased value so that the value is REAL, or else the other coin and paper in circulation will naturally have to take the hit?

Then, too, what of the global economy? We neither have virtual OR actual walls separating America and Americans from the rest of the world, or more accurately, the rest of the world from us, as much as some seem to want just that. The fact is that changing the penny's value would indeed have reverberations beyond this country's borders. We consume product and services from all over the world sometimes with just the tiniest twitch of our "mouse finger". Anyone here drive a Hyundia? A Toyota? Wearing anything from Versace? Gucci? And, it is a symbiotic relationship Micky D's has been a global staple of impulse and comfort eating for decades. Similarly, I don't think Americans are the only folks who have "Googled" their navigational queries on anything from Dafur to Unicef to Viagra to Paris Hilton to Tom Brady to tofu burgers to the public records of their new neighbor.

We are now and forever an interactive and irreversibly intertwined economy. When one country sneezes So, as fundamentally meaningless as money actually is, but

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