Praise be, we are finally killing the Penny

When I took over this newsletter from its previous editor, I was advised to stay away from politics, and these days, talking about them to anyone can be a pain in the posterior. It leads to petty arguments, and the subject is often awash in misery even if you subscribe to a partisan perspective. However, on rare occasions, good things happen or make good old common sense (pun intended).

For this publication, I write about President Donald Trump’s decision to eliminate the cent or penny as it is affectionately known. Now, mentioning the man’s name inspires a lot of sentiment, and I won’t get into that here, but, when he first called for the United States to move on from a coin first minted in a time before electricity was widespread in a social media post earlier this year, I breathed a sigh of relief. My former country, Canada, axed it in 2012, and the economy there did not end; no one in Congress was reflexively opposed to the idea just because of the man’s politics, and online discourse has been positive.

However, you have to wonder why something so obvious took so long.

According to a brief search on Wikipedia, Republicans in Congress have been open to doing away with a coin around two percent of Americans have admitted to throwing right in the trash when they find one since the early 1990s. Elected officials raised other proposals to move on in 2006 and 17, respectively, and, somehow, this thing held on like an annoying relative who won’t leave the house during the holidays or a sibling you wish had never been born who keeps finding ways to contact you (maybe that’s just one for me?). Is it love for Lincoln? Or perhaps legions of little old ladies are writing their representatives every day?

The answer is neither. Instead, as is often the case for the worst things in our world, big money has hindered progress and all in the name of one big business.

In a report from The Associated Press filed in 2007, and currently archived online, back in 1982, when the price of copper surged, the United States Mint chose to shift the metal content in cents to almost entirely zinc. Because we now live in a world where the federal government will farm out anything to the private sector to do instead, even when it is a bad idea (defense contracting is terrible, I am sorry, but I will say it), the task of supplying the blanks for coins was then ultimately given to Jarden Zinc Products (now known as Atrazn, Inc.) and they have since spent millions to keep this part of their business intact even when it is a loss for the federal government, and, by extension, the people paying taxes.

Yes, you read that right, a big zinc conglomerate has kept a failing item going. I cannot believe this is a sentence I have to write, and in a just world, this kind of thing would result in criminal charges for someone, somewhere. Are we so paralyzed by big business and money? I suppose so. To be fair, I do somewhat buy into the argument that keeping it around is good for people who still pay with cash, but even this group is an ever-shrinking pool of consumers. We should be proud that the public has put the penny in the trash heap of history. Let’s hope it stays there as a relic for collectors and does not return from death in future years.

President Abraham Lincoln once said you cannot escape tomorrow’s responsibilities by evading them today. He would be aghast at this ineptitude.

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