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

will accept them. Pennies are antiquated pointless, vestiges of a previous time, which have somehow survived the test of time. Yet every year the cost of manufacturing pennies rises in correlation to the demands of various metals, especially zinc, which continues to a rise in unit price. In 2006 the price of the raw materials from which was made of, exceeds the face value to which made the penny worth more dead than alive. In fact, the government was concerned that people would melt them to sell the raw cooper for a greater profit. Producing these coins is the opposite of cost effectiveness and only acts as a dead weight in our economy.
The today's penny is a crude joke, when being less than worthless if that's possible. For every penny made, this costs the mint 1.66 cents to make. This may seem insignificant, but in 2016 the production of 9 billion pennies amounted to a total loss of almost $123 million dollars. The primary reason is the soaring cost of metals. The price of zinc which composes 97.5 percent of a penny has tripled over the past 15 years. The other 2.5 percent is copper, which was once the sole material of the first penny created by Benjamin Franklin has risen almost fourfold(QZ). Taxpayers lost 0.66 of a cent for each one of the 9.1 billion pennies the Mint produces each year. That is a loss of $60,181,440to produce pennies in 2016. To the government viewpoint, this is not a lot of money, but when a $60,181,440 is coming out of your taxpaying pocket per year, this amount is staggering. Ditching the cost of pennies would altogether not hurt the economy, but the exact opposite. While sparring your taxes in the process (The Spruce).
Consequently, the U.S insistence in keeping the penny is proving to hurt the economy through loss of productivity and opportunity cost of usage.

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.

(ICOF).
Some mislead proponents believe that the cost of the penny is irrelevant since the penny is historically traditional.

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)

(Country).
Supporters of the penny also argue that removing low cent currency from circulation and relying on a rounding metric to the nearest 5 cent increment, would not be cost effective, but poses more risk towards low income citizens who depend on cash payments. This belief was arisen from the study, authored by Raymond Lombra concluded that eliminating the penny would impose a "rounding tax" of at least $600 million per year on American consumers. This idea that consumers would lose this amount is absurd. Lombra’s study applied only to customers purchasing one item per cash transaction. In fact, most of the retail products prices ended with an 8 or 9 and thus Lombra’s study shows that the price would round up to the nearest nickel. But what factor was completely ignored is that most people buy multiple products, in which would randomize the final digit of each transaction. Lombra similarly did not take in account for state sales tax, which would also portray a randomized effect. Even if rounding goes sometimes up, you’d only lose a few pennies, so the consequence is barley minimal (Wiki,1).
When all is said and done would eliminating the penny entirely from our currency save the government substantial amount of money? Perhaps not, since nickels cost 11.2 cents to make, so increasing the production of these coins, would be more impactable than making pennies. Theocratically the only way to save these coins by replacing the metals currently used with plated steel technology or some plastic compound. However, issues would transpire in retrofitting existing minting equipment to handle the new materials, and of the possibility that the new weights of the coins would cause confusion with vending machines and parking meters(Huffington). In either case from the pennies lack of worth, and the increasingly ridiculous cost to make, we the people and our government must set aside those differences and decide the era of the penny is over, for the greater good of the economy.