“Heads or tails?” your friend asks, showing a penny in his hand.
“Heads,” you say.
Your friend flips the coin in the air, but before it lands back on his palm, there are some topics to discuss.
If we vote “yes” to eliminating pennies, these kinds of conversations could end by 2050. Why? A penny is used multiple times, for around 30 years until someone throws it away or eats it or destroys it or whatever someone might do to it to make it unusable. If we vote “yes” to eliminating pennies, it would take a mere 20 years to reflect our changes and another small ten years to completely eliminate the penny. That means you and your friend won’t be able to flip pennies anymore soon! For this reason, we should keep the penny. Moreover, a recent survey of 11 Clague eighth grade students found that 85.7 percent of the responders wanted to keep pennies; for this reason we should keep the penny.
Sure, the penny might have cost the U.S. a whopping $85 million in total in 2024 and 3.7 cents for each, but the $85 million cost is useless junk. The most used coin besides pennies are the nickels, so we would have to replace pennies with nickels. However, in 2024 a single nickel cost 14 cents — more than twice its face value. This would cost the U.S. millions more than making pennies, so eliminating pennies would not be the smartest idea in the world if you’re trying to save money.
Clague eighth grade student Nicholas Schneider acknowledged that pennies aren’t the most important thing in the world, but Schneider still thought that pennies are good.
“They are funny and I think they are cool,” Schneider said.
Even though pennies are cheaper than their alternative coins, it is true that 87 percent of all purchases were made by credit cards in 2024. However, there is a hidden fee for all purchases made via credit cards (around 1.5 to 4 percent of the original purchase, LawPay). This might not seem that much, but popular businesses can have thousands of credit transactions, resulting in a fee percentage ranging from 15 to as high as 50 percent. This huge change can motivate businesses to raise the prices to accommodate the fee loss, which would be against customers and possibly even motivate customers to stop buying their items there.
Despite the two ridiculous ideas of getting rid of the penny, some still argue that pennies are made of zinc and copper, which are expensive. However, this doesn’t matter because in 2023, a bipartisan group in Congress introduced a bill that would “authorize the US Mint [the place where the US makes their coins] to alter the metal of coins [to less expensive metals]” (Wall Street Journal via Magzter). This would make it significantly cheaper to produce pennies. For example, if we used aluminum and steel instead, it would take a mere 0.75 cents to create a penny.
Considering the three ideas of eliminating the penny and how it is ridiculous, there should be no more arguments why the penny should be gone. It should even be kept, as people say eliminating them would increase inflation. However, some people might think that it wouldn’t. This is most obviously false, as if we stop using pennies, we would have to round prices to the nearest nickel. In a recent study, Canada costs grocery store customers an extra $3.7 million in Canada’s currency (around 2.5 million USD) annually after eliminating the penny. This is inflation, so there is no reason to think that inflation is nothing to worry about when eliminating the penny,
Moreover, we should keep the penny because they are used to make charitable acts. In 2021, a total of $1.7 billion was donated in the US (NASCO) using insignificant items (such as pennies). If we eliminate the penny, it is estimated that we would lose a significantly large amount of donations.
Clague eighth grade student Lucas Ha thought that pennies are great.
“I am very fond of [pennies] because they’re brown and small and fit in my pocket and I can use them as spare change,” Ha said.
While pennies do cost a lot of money to create them, the good sides of the pennies outweigh the bad sides of the pennies. Trump earlier declared that the U.S. Mint should stop making pennies. However, that is no use, because direct control over the U.S. Mint is from Congress, not the president. So let’s prevent Congress from eliminating pennies so we can keep on flipping coins like we used to.
