Why Is It Important To Keep A Penny

Pennies don’t put in their two cents for their place as a part of American currency. It’s not like they’re particularly useful. Almost nobody picks them up unless it’s in the hope that the face of the long-deceased Abraham Lincoln might bring them good fortune of some odd sort. Thieves don’t scrounge around people’s pockets for pennies, and then have the person call the police for their missing penny. When most people say that they want to keep the penny, most of the time it will simply be an infantile argument about the baseless need to keep the penny just because it’s always been that way. Just because something’s always been done one way doesn’t mean that it’s the right way. The penny used to be important and useful before inflation,
The article It's time to kill the penny: Fmr US Mint director aptly says “Former U.S. Mint Director Philip Diehl has advice for anyone who has ever come across a penny and thought about bending over to pick it up. Don't. You'll be earning less than the minimum wage for your troubles.” That’s right. In the time it takes to bend down to pick up a penny, anyone could be earning more at a minimum wage job. Pennies are worthless if they pay less than minimum wage, especially with inflation. To me, the fact that pennies are commonly found on the ground says something even greater than this. As the article End of the Penny has to say about the matter, ‘When people start leaving a monetary unit at the cash register for the next customer, the unit is too small to be useful,’ he[Greg Mankiw, Chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisers under President Bush] said.” If a customer leaves pennies behind for the next customer, the first one isn’t helping. The most it could do is help the other customer get even change. If we can’t even use it, what’s the point? It’s worth too little to be useful at all at this point in
From the article mentioned above, It's time to kill the penny: Fmr US Mint director, We see that the penny is nothing more than an encumbrance. It says “‘The reality is that about 25 percent of all transactions are now in cash. The other 75 is in electronic forms of one type or another.’ [From Phillip Diehl, Former Director of the U.S Mint]” The pennies being carried around right now weigh more, value less than a dollar, and are only used in 25% of transactions, if even that many. We carry these wrongfully christened coppers around for use in less than one fourth of the times that an exchange of money occurs. As the article Can We All Just Agree That Pennies Are Stupid And Need To Be Retired? states, “And some Americans are already used to a life without pennies. U.S. military bases abroad gave up on the coins around 30 years ago. The Department of Defense told the Los Angeles Times in 2008 that they were simply ‘too heavy and are not cost-effective to ship.’” U.S Military bases gave up on using the penny due to its inefficiency, and the fact that it’s a huge inconvenience. If the government didn’t stop using the penny, the consequences would have been dire. When the military can’t be funded, everyone is in trouble. Innocents could die. Even something that’s just a small nuisance to the general populace could be life-threatening to the soldier without ammunition. The penny is an inconvenience, and