Argumentative Essay About Pennies

The arguments for halting production of pennies basically boil down to the fact that “they’re more trouble than they’re worth.” Pennies today are worth almost nothing, but they still cost money to produce and consume vast quantities of natural resources. To anti-penny activists, that’s a lot of costs for a coin that can’t even buy a ball of gum anymore.

1. They’re Useless

When the Baby Boomers were young, a penny still had some value. Economist Henry Aaron of the Brookings Institution, a nonprofit research group, reminisces in a 2013 anti-penny screed about paying a nickel for an ice cream cone as a boy. Even during my childhood in the 1980s, there was a candy store not far from our house that sold “penny candy” in jars – one penny for a

mini Tootsie Roll, or two for a Mary Jane.

Today, there’s literally nothing you can buy with a single penny – and you can’t do much else with it either. Vending machines don’t accept them, and neither do most parking meters. Even automatic toll booths won’t take them – except in Illinois, the home state of President Abraham Lincoln, whose face adorns the coin.

And if a single penny is useless, a whole bunch of pennies isn’t much better.

If you try paying for something in a store with a fistful of pennies, you can expect dirty looks from both the clerk and the other customers – if the store doesn’t just flat-out refuse to take them. Pennies are so hard to spend that many people don’t even bother – they just store them all in jars, or even throw them away. Economist Greg Mankiw of Harvard University argues that pennies are simply no longer useful as a means of exchange: “When people start leaving a monetary unit at the cash register for the next customer, the unit is too small to be

useful.”

There are precedents for getting rid of coins that are too small to use. Back in 1857, the U.S. Mint stopped producing halfpenny coins – which, according to the historical information calculator at MeasuringWorth.com, had a purchasing power of $0.14 in 2015 dollars. So at the time it was eliminated, the “useless” halfpenny could buy as much as 14 pennies can today. If consumers in 1857 could get along without halfpennies, then modern consumers can almost certainly manage without a coin that’s worth less than one-tenth as much.

2. They Waste Time

As useless as pennies are, most of us can’t avoid them. Often, when we pay with cash at a store, the total amount doesn’t end in a multiple of $0.05 – so to pay the exact amount, we have to either hand over some pennies or receive some in change.

This not only weighs down our pockets, it also holds up the line while we mess around counting out coins. Citizens to Retire the U.S. Penny cites a study done by Walgreens and the National Association of Convenience Stores showing that handling pennies adds an average of two seconds to each cash transaction. That doesn’t sound like much, but a 2012 study by three Federal Reserve Banks shows that the average consumer makes 23 cash transactions in a single month – and according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are over 316 million consumers in the country. Add it all up, and it comes to more than 48 million hours wasted each year.

To save time at the register, some businesses have experimented with rounding all transactions to the nearest nickel. The New Jersey Star-Ledger reports that several Chipotle restaurants tried this in 2012, but customers who had extra cents added to their bills complained. Rather than drop the practice completely, however, the stores decided to simply round all bills down to the nearest $0.05, since losing a cent or two on most transactions was cheaper than paying clerks to count out pennies.

Supporters of the penny don’t buy this argument.

Americans for Common Cents, the pro-penny group funded by the zinc industry, calls the claim “absurd.” In the first place, the group argues, employees who spend less time counting out change won’t necessarily spend it on other, more useful tasks. It also says there are “many reasons to believe” that time spent at the register could actually increase, rather than decrease, if pennies are eliminated – but it doesn’t actually say what those reasons are.

3. They’re Bad for the Environment

Despite what the old song says, pennies don’t really come from heaven. They come from mines in the earth – zinc mines, mostly, because pennies are more than 97% zinc. As the U.S. Mint explains, the copper surface of a penny accounts for only 2.5% of its metal content.

According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, zinc ores contain only 3% to 11% metallic zinc. Along with the zinc, the ores usually contain other metals, including toxic metals like cadmium and lead. In addition, zinc itself, though necessary in small amounts, is harmful in high doses to both humans and animals. All these toxic metals can contaminate water, soil, and plants in the area surrounding the

mine.

Producing pennies also uses a great deal of energy. It takes energy to extract the zinc from the ore, to roll it out and stamp it into coins, and, not trivially, to transport the coins to banks. Because pennies are worth so little, they’re much heavier than any other coin in proportion to their value. DesignLife-Cycle.org, a site created by students at the University of California, calculates that just transporting pennies to banks – not even counting any of the other stages of their production – puts about 1.5 million metric tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere each year.

4. They Cost the Government Money

Anti-penny advocates are fond of pointing out that pennies now cost more to produce than they’re actually worth. According to the 2014 Annual Report from the U.S. Mint, it now costs about $0.017 – or 1.7 cents – to make one cent. That means whenever the Mint produces a penny and sends it out to a bank, it’s actually losing money on the deal. The Mint has researched the possibility of making pennies from cheaper materials, but it found that there’s no way to bring the cost of producing them below their face value.

Of course, spending $0.017 to make a coin that’s worth only $0.01 isn’t necessarily a bad idea, because coins are reusable. In theory, a single penny could be used for hundreds, thousands, or even millions of transactions before it drops out of circulation. However, this only works if the coins actually do circulate – and pennies, as noted above, often don’t. They’re so hard to use that they end up stuffed in jars or abandoned on sidewalks.

As a result, the Mint just has to keep making more pennies at a loss. In 2014, the Mint shipped out more pennies than nickels, quarters, and dimes put together – over 7.9 billion coins. That adds up to a loss of over $55 million for that year alone.

One problem with this argument, according to penny proponents, is that if there were no pennies, the Mint would have to produce more nickels. Nickels also cost more to make than their face value – about $0.081 apiece – so the Mint loses even more money on each nickel it produces than it does on each penny.

Many anti-penny activists think the ideal solution to this problem is to eliminate the nickel as well, making the dime the smallest coin in circulation. Dimes cost only $0.039 to make, so the Mint could produce more of those without losing money. Aaron notes in his Brookings Institution editorial that eliminating both pennies and nickels would round off all cash transactions to the nearest $0.10, making for “easier math” and “less stuff in our pockets.”