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Thursday, March 28
The Indiana Daily Student

A penny for our thoughts

Don't cry, Lincoln

Last week, the Canadian government announced that it will be phasing out the use and production of its penny throughout 2012.

Well, that’s great for Canada, you might say, but why should we care?

To put it bluntly, the penny makes no cents. And if that isn’t your kind of humor, this article might not be for you.

But really, Canada is taking a huge step the United States should follow. The American penny is an absolute leech on our economy.

How can something so small be such a drainage? Well, it’s a worthless metal disk that costs about 1.6 cents to make.

Somehow, that doesn’t add up.

And when you add that up, combined with transportation costs and the time and effort it takes to count them, the American penny costs us about $900,000,000 annually.

That’s a lot of zeros.

But maybe you’re the nostalgic type. Maybe you don’t mind paying close to a billion dollars a year to have a constant reminder of your childhood, when pennies used to be worth something.

The problem with this logic is that they aren’t worth anything now.

Seriously, go try to find a vending machine or toll-booth that would let you pay for something with pennies.

Or try to pay a cashier for something exclusively using pennies. If the cashier won’t choke you to death for wasting time, the people behind you probably will.

But the opposite of this is equally annoying. We’ve all paid $4.96 for something with a five dollar bill, forcing the cashier to give us four pennies back.

What do you always do with those pennies? Invest them? Buy something? Or toss them in your cup-holder, never to think of them again?

And don’t try to make this about Abraham Lincoln. The guy freed the slaves and literally lifted a man by the throat and shook him into submission when he was confronted with a fight.

I doubt his sense of self-worth would come from whether he’s on the penny.

So with all this evidence against it, you’d think that the penny would have been cut from U.S. circulation the second its production costs became more than a penny — some alternative reality where the world makes sense, rather than cents.

But we live in this world, and the penny remains. Why?

Because it’s a boring subject and no one cares.

The penny isn’t like gay marriage or gun control. It’s not something that Republicans or Democrats can use to get their voters angry and in the voting booths.

It’s a logical problem with a logical solution. And if there’s anything in this world that politicians hate, it’s logic.

It’s kind of a boring subject, but it’s one that could save the U.S. close to a billion dollars annually.

With the economy the way it is, we need all the help we can get. And with the elimination of the penny, we’d have $0.99 problems, but a penny wouldn’t be one.

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