America’s Smallest Coin Just Got Canceled

The penny finally drops. America finally killed a coin that cost more than it was worth. The New York Times reports that after 232 years, the penny has been officially retired. The treasury says each $0.01 coin cost nearly $0.04 to make, producing tens of millions of dollars in losses every single year. Ending the penny took decades of failed legislation, but mostly due to lobbying by zinc producers who depended on the coins composition for revenue, while charities and some retailers preferred to keep it. A Federal Reserve study found any rounding effect on consumers would be tiny, far smaller than the amount taxpayers were burning to mint a coin most people now toss in jars. More than 250 billion pennies remain in circulation, meaning the fade out will be slow. But the decision marks a rare moment in Washington. A small, outdated tradition finally ended because the math stopped making sense. Okay, so what's the real message here? Political special interest groups have fought for decades to prop up the penny and keep it alive because it meant not pennies, but millions of dollars for their bottom line if they were selling copper or zinc or lobbyist. Finally, finally, those people have been pushed away. We can get rid of this albatross, the penny. Let's dig a little deeper. Now. I'm old enough to remember where there was literally such a thing as penny Candy in the 1960s. If I had four pennies in my pocket, I could walk to the candy store and I could, I don't remember how many pieces of candy, but I could literally buy candy with four pennies in my pocket. Obviously, those days are gone. This is a perfect example, frankly, of the real waste and gupper. Everyone thinks that government's wasteful, but the perception is we give, you know, a third of our budget to foreign aid, a third of our budget to illegal immigrants, and a third of our budget to minorities we don't like who have 18 children, live in the inner city. That's the perception a lot of people have that that's where government waste is. That's not where government. It's in things like pennies, where you have often bipartisan support from senators and members of Congress where they think, yeah, I know it's good for the country if we got rid of this wasteful thing. But I've got a copper mine and I want my people to be able to make money and essentially be subsidized. So that's the welfare. The welfare. Were these copper miners making this? Let's go over some more facts and details about this because it truly is amazing how it cost. According to the Mint, they have no incentive to lie cost between 3.69 cents to 3.7 cents to make every penny. So it results in as much as $117 million in loss for taxpayers. Why would you make money that costs more money than what the money's worth? It makes absolute no sense. And this has been going on for a long time. I remember back when I worked as an aid, a low level aid to a member of Congress 35 years ago, they were talking about let's get rid of the penny. It's wasteful. But the copper mining interests have opposed the legislation and Republicans and Democrats from states that had copper mines said ixnay on the banning of the penny. And they had their way for a long, long time. Now other countries, including Canada, Australia and New Zealand, have already retired their smallest coins and simply round cash totals. The studies show that it has almost no impact at all on inflation or fairness. So let me be honest and fair here. Again, I'm here as a sane, sensible centrist. I commend the Trump administration for doing the right thing here. This is a case where someone, I don't know who was in the administration and what changed in Congress, but somehow a decision was made for the greater good, not for just pandering or appeasing a special interest, a mining company, or giving welfare to some workers, miners, over others. So that is a good thing.