by Lorien Cox

Created on: November 16, 2010   Last Updated: November 17, 2010

It costs $.017 cents to make a penny.  That means the Federal government, and in-turn, tax payers are spending $70 Million annually to subsidize the pennies existence.  Pennies, in all actuality, are less than worthless.  We could consider switching to a steel penny, which would be far cheaper to produce, but that wouldn't cut down on the estimated $1 Billion in productivity loss caused by the handling of pennies. 

Even beyond all of the logical, fact-based arguments, when it comes down to it, they are a nuisance.  You can hardly spend them.  Vending machines, parking meters, toll booths, slot machines......none of them take pennies.  They rattle around in your purse or pocket, find their way into every crevice of your car and often end up being sucked up by a vacuum never to be seen again.  I myself threw pennies in the trash when I was a kid, because even back in the 80's it was a pain to try and spend them.  If you want to roll 'em up and trade them for a dollar, it's time consuming and loses out in the cost benefit analysis.  It's probably the equivalent of earning $4 an hour, only not even close to as awesome because your having to do that work just so that you can spend the money you've already worked for. Sure, you can invest in one of those rolling machines that you saw in the Sky Mall catalogue or go to a Coinstar machine and pay it to do the work for you, but I feel like paying to use your own money should be illegal on principle alone.

To delve even deeper, it costs 9 cents to make a nickel.  That's probably around another $9 million tax dollars wasted. It's even more less than worthless than the penny, but if we were to eliminate the nickel, we'd also have to eliminate the quarter, and well.....people, psychologically, can only handle so much change.....no pun intended. 

And, if you really want, if we were to switch to a coin dollar only and eliminate the easily damaged paper dollar, we would save $500 Million dollars a year.  I can't think of a whole lot of changes that would have to be made to easily implement this....strippers might need to get a tip jar or pouch to hang off their garter, but beyond that I'm stumped. 

With as much debt as this country is in, we can't afford sentimentality. It's an emotion of fools if left unchecked by reality and the stuff hoarders are made of.  And, in my opinion, I think Lincoln might be offended that his face graces a less than worthless coin.   Perhaps we should just eliminate the nickel, and change the value of a penny to 5 cents?

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