When I was young, my mom taught me a rhyme: “Find a penny, pick it up, and all the day you’ll have good luck.”
So anytime I saw a penny on the ground, I’d grab it, slip it into my shoe and move on to a day of outrageous fortune.
Now that I’m a bit older, I have a pile of pennies overflowing on my desk, growing by the day and generally being a nuisance.
The penny has overstayed its welcome, and our ever-prudent neighbors to the north have finally done something about it.
Last Monday, Canada officially removed the penny from circulation, a move our government should consider copying. It’s going to be a simple transition for them, with plenty of valid reasons for making it that aren’t singular to Canada.
Canadians will still be able to make transactions down to the cent using credit cards or checks, something old people taking too long in line at Walmart will be delighted to hear, but all cash exchanges will be rounded to the nearest 5-cent denomination.
Simple, isn’t it?
It’s a wonder our government, despite its cost-cutting mood in recent years, has not opted to make a similar switch.
The best reason for eliminating the penny is an extremely simple one – the production cost of one penny is more than the value of the penny itself.
In 2011, the U.S. Mint reported that the price induced to produce one penny had risen to more than two cents. For the nearly $50 million dollars worth of pennies produced that year, the government spent about $120 million.
That kind of waste is unjustifiable in a time when we’re supposed to be enduring a modicum of sacrifice and austerity. Even in a time of prosperity, it’d be a sizable amount of money going down the drain.
Is anyone going to be upset if we get rid of the penny?
The only real problem I can think of is that Abe Lincoln will now be slightly less represented on our currency than some other presidents. But something tells me he won’t be terribly upset about that.
It’s 2012, and the world is changing.
Drugstores don’t sell bubblegum or Mary Janes for a penny anymore, but we can flash our smartphones under a scanner to buy our morning coffee. Our little copper-wrapped zinc coin is now nothing but a tiny anachronism.
Give it a few years, and we’ll have chips implanted in our arms we use to pay the bills. Cash is on the way out, and getting rid of the penny is a good first step in that direction.
The mint estimates about 140 billion pennies are currently in circulation. Given the price of the metals making up the coins, the government could recoup about $700 million by melting down the coins and selling the metals at face value, according to Coinflation.com’s intrinsic value table.
It may be only a drop in the bucket of our national debt, but there’s hardly a downside when the pennies will just be sitting in old coffee cans collecting rust anyway.
For me, we should follow the Canadians’ lead on a lot more than their penny policy, but this is something even the most hardcore fifty-four-fortiers can get behind. It’s just like Game said in “State of Emergency;” if it don’t make dollars, don’t make cents.
