Penny Argumentative Essay

The tale of the penny is a saddened fate of how history changed the tide from once revered and valuable to now uninspiring and a burden. Inflation has diminished its value to where now taking 7 cents to buy what a penny brought in 1956. Today this U.S cent is no longer pivotal in American currency and is finding itself to be more trouble than it’s worth. One of the glaring issues is producing a penny costs more than its own worth. The time is now for the penny to end the 230-year journey and fade away as dust in the wind. But, this coin continues to persist while evading every effort to meet its demise.
The core problem lies with having no purchasing power in the modern economy. No state will accept the payment of pennies in bulk and no vending

The National Association of Convenience Stores has estimated that an average of 2.25 seconds is spent handling pennies during each cash transaction. Using that figure, Jeff Gore of the group Citizens for Retiring the Penny has calculated that $15 billion is lost each year simply by dealing with pennies at the cash register. Because our country doesn’t include sales tax in prices unlike every other civilized country in the world, the average person must calculate by decimals instantly in their mind, which most cannot. By the time you discover the true cost of your goods, the pennies you inevitably fiddle, adds to 2 seconds on every transaction, which is less than the value of your time and the time of those standing behind you. Because being such a time-wasting nuisance, most normal people opt to pay with cash or credit transactions anyway, rather than use coins at all.

But how can we remove minted coins you may ask? The answer would be the same way as before when we removed coins from the mint in the past. From 1793 until 1857, the United States produced the half-cent coin. At the time when the working wage was an average dollar a day, the half-cent was indispensable, but when inflation rose, and the dollar dropped, the half-cent no longer had any usage, which became a chore to sustain. Congress then responded with ceasing operations of the “Liberty Cap half a cent” and sure enough the half-cent was no more. The predicament is now the same in the modern day. The penny is no longer economically viable. Many countries from the likes of Canada, New Zealand, Brazil, Britain all had eliminated their version of the one- and two-penny coins without civil strife or economic devastation. Even the U.S.'s overseas military bases eliminated the penny during the 1980s, due to high transportation costs (The Spruce 1)