One cent. One hundredth of a dollar.

The lowest
denomination of the US currency. These are all names for the penny, but what is the penny actually worth? The US penny has existed since 1793, but the idea originated as small silver coins in medieval Europe or even earlier as a low-value coin. However, the value of the materials used to make the penny is worth more than the pennys value, and this cost keeps going up every year.

Quick Facts
The loss in protability due to producing the one cent coin in the United States for the year of 2012 was $58,000,000. This was a slight decrease from 2011, the year before, which had a production loss of $60,200,000. Swallowing the penny, which is 97.5% zinc, can cause damage to the stomach lining because of the high solubility of the zinc ion in the acidic stomach. Coins are the most commonly ingested foreign body in children. Australia, Brazil, Britain, Finland, Hong Kong, Hungary, Israel, Mexico, Sweden, and Canada have all gotten rid of their one cent piece without adverse effects The United States has abolished its 1/2 cent piece in a time when it had the buying power of todays dime The Nickel also costs more than its worth, so perhaps there are more coins to ght! But one at a time.

PENNIES
ABOLISH THEM
MISSION STATEMENT
The penny should be abolished because it is a dead weight to our economy, in our pockets, and in our hearts.

The government is essentially throwing away hundreds of millions of dollars a year minting coinage that has little to no worth. Pennies are rarely ever used in facilitating commerce anyways, so getting rid of it wouldnt have a huge impact on the economy. Many might think it will cause a drastic change in the economy, but discontinuing the half-penny in 1857 had no serious repercussions to the economy, so getting rid of the penny wont change the economy any more than getting rid of the half-penny did. Getting rid of the penny will be benecial to both the government as well as the consumer. The government saves hundreds of millions of dollars per year, and consumers dont have to ddle with a small coin with little value that they may never use again.

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A Brief History
! There have been 16 different designs. Benjamin Franklin designed the rst American penny in 1787, the Fugio cent. Tt bears the image of a chain with 13 links, each representing one of the original colonies, which encircles the motto We Are One on the reverse. !

Problems with the Penny

The penny doesnt facilitate commerce, because it simply doesnt have enough value. What can you buy with a penny? You might suggest those souvenir 51 cent machines, but even they arent interested in your pennies. They take your valuable quarters, crush your valueless pennies, give them back to you. The penny made sense when it could buy things, and thus facilitate commerce, but no more. The penny is worth more dead than alive! The metal the penny is made out of is worth 2.17 cents. Let that settle in your mind for a moment. The metal the penny is made of is worth more than twice as much as the penny is.

Abolition- The Solution

! The solution to this penny crisis is to stop minting pennies, just as Canada did. They stopped minting pennies, but people could still use them. Every time a penny is given to a bank, it is then sent to the treasury and melted down. This led to an exponential decrease in the amount in circulation, and the cost of goods is rounded to the nearest ve cents.

The Indian cent was rst introduced in 1859 and depicted an Indian princess. A popular story about its design claims a visiting Indian chief lent the designer's daughter his headdress so she could pose as the Indian princess. Most Indian cents minted during the Civil War went primarily to pay Union soldiers.

Abraham Lincoln was the rst historical person to be featured on a U.S. coin. In 1909, he was portrayed on the penny to commemorate his 100th birthday. The Lincoln penny (designed by Victor David Brenner) was also the rst U.S. cent to include the words "In God We Trust." In 2009, to honor the 200th anniversary of Lincoln's birth, four penny designs illustrating different aspects of the Lincolns life were distributed. In the current 2010 design, "Preservation of the Union", the tails side of the coin features a design symbolic of President Abraham Lincoln's preservation of the United States as a single and united country.

This means our federal government is wasting $100,000,000 every year, money that could go towards education or any number of things, to produce almost ve billion pieces of useless copper and zinc that, by a 2006 law, are prohibited from being melted down. This law came out of a time when people realized the face value of the penny was less than the value of its, metal, so they melted them down to realize its true value. Instead of abolishing the penny and allowing us to take it of circulation, the government introduced this law to prevent a shortage of the penny or nickels.

Theyve been out of production since 2012, and, unlike what some people thought, the cost of goods didnt go up and charitable donations didnt go down. Everything stayed the same, except in a few years the penny will be virtually non existent. The 2 cent gain or loss per transaction is too little to bother with, so this solution is a benign one. ! This worked in Canada, along with many other nations, has abolished the penny, so why hasnt the United States? As John Green said in one of his lectures, because: politics. This issue isnt a very important one, it is bipartisan, and is simply too small to care about. Despite the fact that it is a great way to save some money to help balance the budget, instead of cutting PBS funding, since it isnt an issue that will get someone votes, it wont happen in our corrupt government