Ban Pennies

From an article titled "Penny Dreadful" in The New Yorker:

Quoting David Owen:

[P]roducing a penny now costs about 1.7 cents. Since the Mint currently manufactures more than seven billion pennies a year and "sells" them to the Federal Reserve at their face value, the Treasury incurs an annual penny deficit of about fifty million dollars...

A modern penny simply isn’t worth enough to worry about.  In 1940, an average one-pound loaf of bread sold for eight cents, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.  That means that a penny in those days bought enough bread to make a good-sized sandwich.  These days, a penny doesn’t buy much more than a bit of crust.  Accurately comparing monetary values (and bread loaves) across decades is impossible, but by almost any economic measure a 1940 penny had more purchasing power than a modern quarter does; in 1940, then, consumers got by, quite contentedly, without the equivalent of our penny, nickel, or dime.  And many people continue to get by without these coins today, since in the actual marketplace consumers tend to treat the quarter as the smallest meaningful denomination.

I never pick up pennies off the ground.  I regularly leave pennies behind if I receive them as change.  And I’ve been known to angrily throw pennies out the window of my (non-moving) car if I find any of them contaminating my change tray, in which I keep only silver change.

I knew I wasn’t crazy.