Why the Penny Should Be Eliminated

A Bill To Eliminate The Penny: Prelim Legislation #19: PRO
The penny: Everyday you find them in your coat pocket, or lying on the sidewalk. Anyone who has been to a fast food restaurant has experienced the frustration of being behind someone who is attempting to pay for their purchase off the dollar menu with 100 pennies, wasting the time of everyone else in line. Pennies take refuge under couch cushions, and are either tossed to the side or put in a jar to be eventually traded in. In this day and age, nothing costs a penny anymore. Penny candies are a dime. 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. The mere uselessness of the coin should be a reason in of itself to get rid of this small hassle. However, it also wastes the United States millions a year. Today, it costs the U.S about 1.7 cents to make a penny. The amount of pennies minted each year varies, but it usually ranges between 3 billion and 7 billion per year. So in turn, instead of actually earning money from making these coins, the U.S can lose huge amounts of money. According to the The Washington Post In 2007, the U.S. Mint lost $31 million in making 6.6 billion new pennies. The current funding for pennies is only about 14.79 million dollars. Think about it: If there is an extra 16 million dollars being spent, where does that money come from? Out of tax payers’ pockets of course. Our hard earned money is being used to make even more money, except in a useless form. Retailers, too, incur penny-related costs of their own. More than 10 years ago, in a 1999 article, Time Magazine estimated that Walgreens lost $1.3 million each year merely counting pennies. When we are already nearly 14 trillion dollars in debt, why should we waste so much money on a coin that’s thrown into fountains at the mall? There are plenty of superior uses for $22 million than producing dead weight currency.
An argument for saving the penny is that it would cause a rise in the cost of living, due to the fact that everything would be rounded up to a nickel. However, eliminating pennies would not create the economic chaos that many anticipate. As Time explains, rounding is standard, daily practice on military bases and in various foreign countries with no major corresponding price jump. Threes and fours get rounded to five, and ones and twos get rounded to zero. Besides, the use of paper and coin money is becoming less and less popular each day. Almost everyone owns multiple Visas or American Express cards. When using credit cards or debit cards, no rounding is needed. Eventually coin and paper money will become very scarce, and the use for pennies would be even smaller.
Another point is that it wouldn’t change marketing very much at all. Many people fear that something that costs 19.99 will be bumped up to 20 dollars, but in reality, many companies would go from 19.99 to 19.95, which to an average American, seems like an even better deal than before.
In conclusion, I truly believe that eliminating this medial coin will not only save America plenty of money, but will also save people from the constant annoyance that is the penny, and we would never have to worry about counting out pennies or finding them under furniture. We are already in the teeth or a gone by recession, and the last thing we need is to spend money we cannot afford. The only thing we’d be losing would be a little bit of luck when we find one heads up on the pavement. Thank you.