Why Is It Important To Keep A Penny

Pennies don’t put in their two cents for their place as a part of American currency. It’s not like they’re particularly useful. Almost nobody picks them up unless it’s in the hope that the face of the long-deceased Abraham Lincoln might bring them good fortune of some odd sort. Thieves don’t scrounge around people’s pockets for pennies, and then have the person call the police for their missing penny. When most people say that they want to keep the penny, most of the time it will simply be an infantile argument about the baseless need to keep the penny just because it’s always been that way. Just because something’s always been done one way doesn’t mean that it’s the right way. The penny used to be important and useful before inflation,
but now, it’s just sitting in pockets and tip jars, not being used. The penny should be eliminated from American currency because it will cut down taxpayer money, it holds too little monetary value, and it is inconvenient for all involved.

First of all, the penny should be eliminated to cut down taxpayer costs. According to the article The US Is Losing Money On Each Penny Produced But It Wouldn’t Be Easy To Ban The Coin, “Last year, it cost the mint 1.5 cents to produce a penny, creating what in the coin world is known as negative seigniorage. That amounted to a loss of almost $46 million on the production of more than nine billion pennies.” All of the money that the US mint uses for this coin comes straight from the pockets of taxpayers. Producing 9 billion pennies led to the loss of $46 million dollars. $46 MILLION DOLLARS! U.S taxpayers are spending money to spend money, and pennies aren’t even a form of currency that is widely used. The continuation of the production of pennies could lead to an economical downturn for America. From the article Why Keep The Penny, it says “Faced with a similar sea of red ink, Canada stopped making cents in May 2012. That will save Canadian taxpayers $11 million a year, our northern neighbors government reports.” By getting rid of the Canadian penny, Canada has saved it’s taxpayers millions of dollars! If we don’t get rid of the penny, A single mom won’t be able to afford three meals a day for her little angel because of the taxes for pennies on top of everything else she has to pay for. The penny that she doesn’t even bother picking up while taking her kid to soccer practice. The penny costs too much to the taxpayer.

Second of all, pennies are worth too little to be used.
The article It's time to kill the penny: Fmr US Mint director aptly says “Former U.S. Mint Director Philip Diehl has advice for anyone who has ever come across a penny and thought about bending over to pick it up. Don't. You'll be earning less than the minimum wage for your troubles.” That’s right. In the time it takes to bend down to pick up a penny, anyone could be earning more at a minimum wage job. Pennies are worthless if they pay less than minimum wage, especially with inflation. To me, the fact that pennies are commonly found on the ground says something even greater than this. As the article End of the Penny has to say about the matter, ‘When people start leaving a monetary unit at the cash register for the next customer, the unit is too small to be useful,’ he[Greg Mankiw, Chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisers under President Bush] said.” If a customer leaves pennies behind for the next customer, the first one isn’t helping. The most it could do is help the other customer get even change. If we can’t even use it, what’s the point? It’s worth too little to be useful at all at this point in
time.

Thirdly, the penny is just a nuisance and an inconvenience to everyone.
From the article mentioned above, It's time to kill the penny: Fmr US Mint director, We see that the penny is nothing more than an encumbrance. It says “‘The reality is that about 25 percent of all transactions are now in cash. The other 75 is in electronic forms of one type or another.’ [From Phillip Diehl, Former Director of the U.S Mint]” The pennies being carried around right now weigh more, value less than a dollar, and are only used in 25% of transactions, if even that many. We carry these wrongfully christened coppers around for use in less than one fourth of the times that an exchange of money occurs. As the article Can We All Just Agree That Pennies Are Stupid And Need To Be Retired? states, “And some Americans are already used to a life without pennies. U.S. military bases abroad gave up on the coins around 30 years ago. The Department of Defense told the Los Angeles Times in 2008 that they were simply ‘too heavy and are not cost-effective to ship.’” U.S Military bases gave up on using the penny due to its inefficiency, and the fact that it’s a huge inconvenience. If the government didn’t stop using the penny, the consequences would have been dire. When the military can’t be funded, everyone is in trouble. Innocents could die. Even something that’s just a small nuisance to the general populace could be life-threatening to the soldier without ammunition. The penny is an inconvenience, and
inconveniences can cost lives.

Some say that we should keep the penny because it has a long history, dating far back. This in and of itself is not a good reason to keep the penny. There’s a large movement going on right now to remove statues of confederate soldiers, and those have a big history going back. While those people insist upon removing them because of racial offenses taken by the statues, the penny is not offensive, just useless. The short story The Lottery illustrates the problems of the continuation of traditions simply because it’s always been done that way. In this story, a woman is stoned, presumably to death, just because there’s always been a stoning. Even though this isn’t barbaric like that, if anyone really wanted to honor the penny’s history, they could collect them, and keep them as a history piece for the future. Just because it wouldn’t be a form of American currency anymore doesn’t mean that Americans hate good ol’ Abe, it just means that due to inflation, it has become a practically useless form of currency. It could at least have a dignified death instead of becoming so utterly useless in the future due to inflation to where it gets taken out of American currency in shame. Just because something’s always been around doesn’t mean that it’s right. To conclude, it’s very obvious why the penny is undeserving of its place as a part of American currency. It costs taxpayers to produce pennies, and what do taxpayers get in return for their hard-earned taxes? One cent. Once cent isn’t enough to be used for any purpose as a standalone, and is barely used in any other circumstance. Once cent wouldn’t even get someone a single gumball from a gumball machine. Carrying them around is a nuisance too. We have to lug these heavy metal coins around hoping that maybe we can get even change at a store. It’s a very inconvenient piece of metal trash. The penny is useless in every way, and when it does impact anyone’s day to day life, it will almost always be bad. The penny needs to be eliminated from American currency to further prevent any kind of unfavorable event from making someone’s life far harder than it need be.