Pennies, Memories, or Wastes of Space?

Controversially, governments around the world are slowly eliminating their lower-value coins. Examples of such countries that are in the process of disposing of their coins, or have already done so, include Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, Finland, The Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, And Great Britain. A country that will perhaps be placed onto this list will be the United States of America eliminating production of their pennies and other virtually worthless coins.

During April 2012, our friends up north in Canada, shocked the world by the Canadian government announcing that they would be halting production of their lowest value coin—the Canadian penny. The Canadian government has decided to do this because it costs 1.6 Canadian cents to produce one cent! Same holds true for America. Each American penny costs 2.41 cents to produce and distribute across the country. If this isn't putting the crisis at hand over the penny for you, American taxpayers lost over 19.8 million in 2009, 27.4 million in 2010, and to really hit it out of the ballpark, 60.2 million in 2011, over pennies that are virtually useless. Clearly, something is very wrong here as American citizens lose money due to the printing of a small and insignificant coin, the penny.

To the south of the Canadian border, there has been a raging debate that has lasted decades on whether or not to stop producing the penny. Certain groups of Americans argue that eliminating the penny could prove to be too much for the economy and prices could inflate drastically. The Canadian government stated that all retail transactions requiring pennies before the change would either increase or decrease the value of the item for sale, however, online transactions would remain the same. Francois Velde an expert on the history of small change, states, that the decrease or increase of 2.39 to 2.50 or 2.39 to 2.00 cents would be only a small blip on the economic scale. This largely wouldn't affect prices in the long run. The same would hold true for The United States if the government determined to eliminate the penny from use in the country.

Similarly, others claim that when used as a group, the penny can equal a large sum of money, such as in Washington Middle School. Washington Middle helped raise $3000 by bringing in large bags and entire jars of pennies. This proves that everyone and anyone is willing to casually give up their pennies, which again confirms how little of worth they are to the American people. Pennies also take up entire jars and bags, and for what? At the maximum around 5 dollars per each container? So yes, it truly really takes an entire school’s worth of people’s pennies to reach these goals.

In the large scale, pennies are entirely worthless. They are bulky and take up space, and people including children, (who keep in mind would never give away their more valuable money), would just casually give away bags upon bags of pennies since they are worth so little. Groups who are worried about the economy if the U.S government decided to relinquish the penny from production are worrying over nothing. The inflation would be small and minimal and would definitely still not deter anyone from getting an Egg McMuffin from McDonald's because of it being a few measly cents more. And this proves that the government should finally join the list of countries and halt production indefinitely of our lowest-value coin, the penny.