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Personally, I have mixed feelings about this. I see and agree with both sides. That being said, I tend to favor the status quo, and so I’d prefer to leave them in circulation. But does that make sense for the US Mint?

Pennies cost more than one cent to manufacture. Despite the fact that they are primarily made of zinc now, rather than the copper that was used until 1982, their cost is now more than there worth. This is likely to only get worse as the price of metals increases with the inflation that is devaluing the penny. It’s illegal to melt down coins for there metal value, but when you can buy metal for, literally, pennies on the dollar, you know it’s likely to happen.

And let’s face it, a penny isn’t worth much, you can’t buy anything with a penny any more. Things that cheap are only sold in large quantities. A penny is really only good to pay the odd totals required from sales tax on items. Many people won’t even carry them, putting them in a jar at home, or similar. They have almost been removed from circulation already.

But there is a flip side. Without a penny, our money starts at 5. As a logical person, I cannot agree that is makes sense for our money to start at 5, which does not make sense. And if a nickel is our smallest unit of currency, how do you deal with prices that do not end in five cent increments? With sales tax, most items end up with odd prices. Do you round them up? Or do you round them down? Or do you round to the nearest five cents? Business and government are not likely to want to risk their income by rounding down, so does that mean that all purchases would be rounded up?

How do you handle accounting with an item having a varied profit depending on what the total cost of a bill is, rather than the individual cost? Or do you round each item up or down individually, so the profit is the same.

Perhaps items could be priced to have even five cent totals with the sales tax in the state they are sold in, but then how do you handle tax exempt buyers, or mail order purchases that require different sales tax from different states, and often require no sales tax?

Would credit cards and electronic transfers still be completed to one cent, since no penny is involved?

The mind boggles trying to figure out how to remove the penny. Perhaps we need a cheaper penny. If they were made of plastic they could be cheaper to produce. This might make them easier to fake, but who would make fake pennies?

That’s my two cents anyways, but let’s faces it; two cents ain’t what it used to be.