No more pennies, let’s go digital

The US Mint lost $69 million making pennies last year

8.4 billion pennies were minted.

This has been bothering me for years. Why on Earth do we still make pennies that cost more than a penny and waste our tax payers’ dollars? Why do we even have nickels and dimes they have no purpose that I can see a use for ? Going digital saves billions of dollars a year for governments around the world. If we are still creating these coins for the sake of giving people jobs let’s redistribute these jobs and put people on a path with a career of more purpose.

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. You can not use them in bulk, try it! Even automatic toll booths won’t take them, except Illinois which is the home state of President Abraham Lincoln, whose face adorns the coin. Greg Mankiw says that "The purpose of the monetary system is to facilitate exchange, but...the penny no longer serves that purpose."

According to the U.S. Mint’s 2014 annual report, the current cost of a penny is 1.7 centsper coin. With nearly 8 billion pennies minted in 2014, the U.S. spent almost $132 million to produce less than $50 million of circulating currency.