Should We Make Cents?
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/02/07/60minutes/main3801455.shtml?so...
The question? Should we keep making those near-worthless pennies and nickels? It now costs America two cents to make one penny, and nearly ten cents to make a nickel. That’s double what the money’s worth! Eight billion pennies are produced each year, which adds up to eighty million dollars. That’s a lot, but it costs even more to make them, adding up to a total of 134 million dollars. Is it worth it? Worldwide demand for copper, metal, and zinc has dramatically increased, being as how they’re used in everyday things such as electric wires. Pennies are 98% zinc, nickels are mostly copper. Zinc has doubled in price over the past few years, and copper’s almost tripled!
The main question that many people ponder over is: is it cost effective to round up all of the pennies in order to toss them from the U.S. economy? It would cost America $600 million dollars a year to collect all of the pennies. Economists are afraid that the poor people of the country will com plain they can no longer afford even the cheapest of materials, claming that stores will round all of their prices up to the nearest nickel. So little kids can forget those one-cent pony rides at Meijer. Schools and charities will complain also, as they are proud donators that collect as many pennies as they can and give them to medical research and the homeless, among other things. Eventually those pennies add up to a large sum – it just takes a long while to add up to any significant amount of money. Other countries that have rid their economy of the lowest coin of worth have experienced a temporary inflation afterwards.
But after all, it is just a penny, right? I personally throw those shiny pieces on the ground (making sure to leave them face up so that a special someone can pick it up and have a “lucky day”). It’s just one cent. One one-hundredth of a dollar, and even a dollar’s not worth a whole lot in America. Try going to a gas station – most of the food is two dollars or more – if you’re lucky you might find a rare piece of 25 cent candy. But that’s on a good day.
And we must consider that America has been resorting to electronic money much more now that credit and debit cards have been created. People find plastic more reliable, and complain of the amount of time it takes to count change and keep it in their pocket. It’s no longer convenient. Will paper money be deleted from U.S. economy as well as metal?
I remember when things changed from “$5!” to “$4.99!” and people were flabbergasted. They believed it to be much cheaper. Well, it looked less pricey, anyway. But I wasn’t fooled, I knew that a penny didn’t make that much of a difference. Once they tacked on sales taxes, the $4.99 would surpass $5 anyway, so whom were they kidding?
Honestly? I don’t care whether we rid America of the penny of not. I’d like to know beforehand though, so that I can at least keep one and frame it. Then I can tell my grandchildren, “Ahh, yup. That happened in my lifetime. I was part of a historically significant event.”
