I AMAmerican Governments An important issue that has not been brought up so much is the retirement of the penny. The main branch of the government that produces coins is the U.S. MINT and have been doing it for over 225 years. Since 1792 the Mint started producing copper, silver, and gold coins. The first circulation of 11,178 cents to the public was on March of 1793. In 1857, Mint stopped using copper because it was becoming more expensive and started adding nickel to the copper. And in 1864, they completely changed its composition to pure zinc. From the time of the production of the penny to around the late 1900, the penny was used to buy things. In today’s day and time, we cannot buy anything with a penny…not even an ACTUAL penny (US MINT).
The current production cost of a penny is 1.5 cents per coin so why keep spending money on something that we are not using? The one-cent US coin is mainly made of zinc with some copper. The penny is the most circulated coin in the United States. Last year alone, the Mint produced more than 8.4 billion pennies for circulation with a total of $69 million in losses. If people would see the bigger picture, that money the and taxpayers are losing can be used for funding for other important programs. The penny has become unprofitable due to inflation and the rising cost of metals since 2006. The inefficiency of making pennies is one of many reasons why other countries such as Canada, Australia, Denmark, New Zealand, Norway and Sweden have quit producing their least important coins. An example of that is Canada. When Canada stopped its production of their penny in 2012, the penny was 1.6 cents to produce and was not adding anything positive into their economy. Today, when making purchases, Canadians either round up or down depending on the total to ignore the fact they are penniless. In most recent elections, there have not been many talks about this since most people do not see this as a priority. In 2006, Representative Jim Kolbe presented the Currency Overhaul for an Industrious Nation (COIN) Act that would ban the penny and rounding off all cash transactions to the nearest 5 cents. People had mixed feelings about it, so nothing was ever done. On March 29, 2017 it was introduced again as the Currency Optimization, Innovation, and National Savings Act of 2017. This bill suspends the production of one-cent coins for a ten-year period to see if banning the penny is successful. As of 2019, there have not been any news or bills passed on this issue.
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AuthorUndergraduate student generated content. Blog posting and updating done by Kristina Flores Victor, Assistant Professor of Political Science at CSUS Archives
March 2020
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