Should We Keep or Get Rid of the Penny?

Pennies are plain worthless! How many times have you walked past a penny on the ground or unmindfully dropped one on the floor and did not even care to pick it up, thinking that a penny is not worth your time or effort. The American government loses millions of dollars a year from just a small, little penny that most people in America feels that it doesn’t even matter that much. So the question is why do we still have it in circulation?

The penny is more of a burden than a help to us. Every year the penny is kept in circulation it is burning a bigger hole in the government’s budget. The penny costs about 1 cent, but costs us more than 2.4 cents to produce. From the production of the penny the treasury loses about $100 million per year. This meaning that .01 dollar costs us more than 10,000,000,000% than its worth. I think that penny has almost no benefits besides making exact change. To me, instead of helping us gain money like currency is supposed to do, the penny is making us lose money.

The penny is not worth our time our effort. The penny makes us wastes 2.4 hours each year. Given the average wage per hour everyone man or woman that has a job loses about $50 from the sorting and counting of pennies. Some people may have a point that we would lose money from rounding to the nearest five during each transaction, but if we were to only make two transactions per day for a year we would lose only $18.25. This is substantial amount compared to the