In a developed body paragraph of at least 200 words, defend or refute the claim that the Penny should be eliminated from the American economy. Draw upon the information provided in the article linked below as well as your own experiences with the use or non-use of the 1 cent piece in everyday life. DUE: Tuesday, February 28 by midnight.
22 comments:
This is a debatable topic, because the country is in a deficit, people will look anywhere to make cuts, as small as they may be, but it just doesn't seem to make any "cents" to cut the penny. First, this idea is anything but new as the topic has been discussed since 1976 (http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=ugNcAAAAIBAJ&sjid=5FQNAAAAIBAJ&pg=5802,2899493&dq=eliminating+the+penny&hl=en) and was most recently brought-about in 2006 (http://www.usatoday.com/money/2006-07-06-penny-usat_x.htm), so the penny is not going anywhere any time soon; And nor should it. The article draws on the fact that Americans are using electronic methods of payment more than cash so why not eliminate the nickel too? The article states that not only does it cost 2.4 cents to manufacture a penny (worth one cent), but 11.2 cents to make a nickel (worth only five cents). Another idea is to simply change the composition of the penny (and the nickel too, while we're at it) to something more affordable and worthwhile. If the penny were to be eliminated altogether, after everyone waits for the last one to be spent out of the currency system, prices (including electronic, i.e. credit card-paid, prices) would have to be rounded to the nearest five cents, and thus the nickel would become the new "penny". It's like downsizing a company: as long as you cut the bottom 10%, you will always have a bottom 10%. You can keep cutting and cutting until the cows come home, but the "penny" will always remain in our economic system in some form or another.
The issue of whether or not to erradicate the penny from the United States currency is not the question, the question is how to erradicate it, whether or not the penny deserves to be immortalized as an object from our contrys past, or diseregarded without the fanfare. The penny itself is hardly used in our transactions these days, other than to create clever marketing schemes to cause prices to appear lower. The penny costs taxpayers more to in production than the penny is actually worth, it costs 2.4 cents to produce a single penny while the actual value for a penny rests at a minimal 1 cent. In addition, how often do we go into a restuaraunt or store and pay in the exact change? Therefore the arguement that the customer would lose out on change is rendered obsolete. The fact that we often pay in rounded sums, for example 10 dollars for something that cost 9.99, shows how we are already moving the penny out of our economy. In addition to that, our economy is largely based on electronic transactions, through credit, debit, and gift cards which can remove the exact price from our accounts without any physical representation of a sigle cent needed. Already when it comes to intrest we earn in money stored in banks or owed on credit cards, we earn interest in the fractions of the cent! Therefore, since we are moving more and more into an economy based on electronic transactions, the wise thing to do would be eliminate the physical representation of the single cent, the penny, while not removing the actual value of a single cent in our pricing or economy.
Most people consider pennies to be near useless except for when exact change is needed. There is, currently, a push to either stop the production of pennies or change the materials used to create the pennies. According to the article that this question is based off of it costs about 2.4 cents to create a penny and 11.2 cents for a nickel. In light of these statistics it would be more cost effective to either use cheaper materials to produce pennies or just halt production of them and use the old materials for pennies to make nickels. Prices could be easily rounded up or down to accomodate these new economic changes with little or no trouble from the american people. Pennies however would not be made completely worthless, they could still be used like other forms of currency whose production was halted such as the two dollar bill and the gold and silver dollars.
Over time, pennies have lost value as the cost of purchased items has become more expensive. I personally stand on the belief that the penny no longer is a necessity in everyday transactions. This topic of taking the penny out of the American currency is a pretty easy topic to cover. One penny does not really make that much of a difference change on payments that or costs that are made. Transactions that are made in our daily routines rarely involve pennies. They usually are electronic or strictly cash based transactions. What coins do you most often find lying around on the ground? Pennies, because they are the least valued and cared about. More money is spent on making pennies and nickles than they are worth, what is that saying right there? We wonder why our country is in a shallow depression and yet we pay more money to make money that is worth almost nothing. There is a pretty big issue when it comes to people getting so called "cheated" out of what is there's. If the penny is taken out our currency, money, bills, checks, and cash back will be rounded either up or down. This rounding of pennies to make the amount a flat rate, really does nothing. It may look better on paper or on a receipt....but when I it gets down to the money being in the bank there really is no difference. It pretty much is all a scandal. God bless America.
I think our money system would be best off if there were just dimes and bills. But that's besides the point. Everyone knows that almost everyone thinks pennies are near useless. Almost everyone I know has a piggy bank in their house filled with pennies and some more change. Even if we did excuse the penny away, I'm sure we'll have enough to exist with all of that "unnecessary penny charging" business we have. Atleast for a while. I think they should take it a away for about a year or so and see how it goes. Either stop the production of pennies or change the material we make it out of. According to this article about eliminating the penny, it costs about 2.4 cents to create a single penny, and 11.2 cents to create a nickel, which of course is only five cents. The only problem I would not like about having pennies is that if a price is $1.99 for example, it would either be $1.94 or $2.04 without pennies. We all know they will probably round that up. But most people don't need the pennies and so therefore we should say bye to the cent so everything else can make a little more "cents."
The penny has a strong meaning to it as why LIncoln's face is on it. Lincoln brought freedpm to so many and a civics lesson all in one which maybe why th epenny is only worth a cent. But today we hardly use the penny and it takes more than a cent to make this is coin which I just found out. The article says that the penny and the nickel are more expensice to make then they are actually worth. Today we are using gift cards, credit cards, and dollar bills today to buy our daily needs. This article is saying that we are using machines more than we do with the actual coins. Still though the penny is only worth a cent it could still be made or changed but the penny will probally stay in this economy longer. A good deal like a few cents lesser than the other doesn't really matter. We could round up like 1.99 to 2. It would be better if we chose different materials to make the penny so we can make nickels.
I think the fact we still have the American penny is ridiculous due to the cost and lack of necessity. Because, as the CNN article said, the penny costs the government 2.4 cents to make. That’s like giving someone 24 dollars in exchange for 10 dollars. So the government is wasting mass amounts of money, unless of course the penny is serving a purpose by stabilizing the economy with precision, but that’s not the case. The reason is that it is too precise. Most Americans would disregard a free penny on the ground because of its uselessness. The loss or gain of a penny wouldn’t generate the slightest concern to nearly anyone, and yet we still waste our money making them because we don’t want to break the tradition that we have always known, the tradition wasting our time counting large amounts of loose change, spilling it on the floor, and irritating the minimum wage paid McDonalds employee. It is the same problem with the nickel, it costs over twice its value to make and yet we still produce it. The only argument that can be made for penny production (and nickels) is that they are needed, but the quantity of value is so small that hardly any American would be impoverished by losing them. We need to abolish penny production because it costs too much for too little purpose and it would make it easier on the McDonalds employees.
Over the past century the penny has lost much of it’s value in today’s society which has made us American’s begin questioning it’s usefulness in an increasingly electronic world. One argument made is that the penny is more of a nuisance then it is actually helpful when purchasing items in stores. It doesn’t surprise me that this argument is made because we often find ourselves spending unnecessary time searching for coins(pennies in particular). It is no secret that this has become a “chore” to us and is really not beneficial due to the pennies decreasing value in the American economy. The penny is hurting our economy also because of the cost it takes to actually make one. Government estimates that it takes 2.4cents to make one single one cent penny. Should our government really be spending an excess amount of money that is so unbeneficial to our nation? The government is in debt as it is and has to find new ways to cut in spending. Why not start here? Also stores are giving out more pennies then actually receiving which in turn increases the demand. This is great in all except that we Americans throw them out making them a completely obsolete piece of currency that only contributes to inflation. So actually by keeping the penny we are actually hurting the American economy. It also is not environmentally friendly to keep producing pennies because of the increase use of energy and factories which contributes to pollution. Therefore, if we were to rid ourselves of the penny we would benefit greatly in many different aspects and would most likely contribute greatly to our economy's recovery.
The penny is part of American history, it bears the face of our sixteenth president who freed the slaves this is something we cannot just erase the past. This is the president that released the slaves with the Emancipation Proclamation in 1963 this is an integral part of our nation's past, the fact that our nation was built upon something ugly, the backs of those enslaved, needs to be remembered not swept under the rug. Now how does the abolition of the penny pertain to this history, the penny is symbolic of our remembrance of the wrong committed under the red white and blue of liberty. Now if there is one fundamental principle that all good American's can agree upon, it is greed, pure and simple we think with our wallets and are infatuated with the dollar bills. This fundamental greed of Americans was the reason we originally fought for independence, because we refused to pay British taxes. With the elimination of the penny all taxes would round up to ten cents on the dollar rather than the current standard of around eight cents, now how as good Americans could we support this, that is like burning dollar bills, it is illegal, and in America nearly a sin. Think with your wallets here the elimination of the penny would result in already overpriced products becoming more expensive, be patriotic think of the foundation of the United States of America, now why would you abandon this heritage?
The penny should be elimnated. People do not see the penny as worth much. When we pay, most people do not look through their wallet for those extra 2 cents. Instead, they find a nickel or dime. When you recieve change, the penny is usually thrown to the bottom of your purse or wallet. The penny is simply not worth keeping in circulation. It would not be missed and the only effect of not having it would be that prices would have to be in 5 or 10 cent increments. The only problem with this would be that people would see it as prices have gone up. But in reality, the prices would have only risen by a few cents. Some people might say that it would be "un-American" to abolish the penny because it represents Abe Lincoln and all he accomplished during his presidency. But in fact, Abe Lincoln is also on the face of the five dollar bill, which is more widely used than the penny.
In the article, it states that it cost 2.4 cents for the government to issue pennies. I believe that by eliminating the penny, it would save the government lots of money which would be bennificial considering the amount of debt our country is in. Eliminating the penny would be a good decision for our country.
The article clearly shows that the penny is not worth it anymore, Just the cost of making them alone is enough for me to support making the penny obsolete. It is understandable that the poeple of the U.S. would want to keep the penny.It is one of the symbols of America and its prosperous economy, and has an added importance because it has the face of President Abraham Lincoln on it. I believe that removing the penny would be a huge change in America, but i doubt that it would have that much of an impact in the U.S. economy. We could still respect it by having pennies in museums, and I have no doubt that it would become similar to the two dollar bill, unused but highly exciting to find. Another reason to get rid of the penny is that it is not eco friendly. The material used to make the penny is both expensive and damaging to the earth. And how often do Americans actually use a penny? I know that the only time I have actually used a penny to buy something is when I used a penny gumball machine. The removal of the penny would be a change at first but I have no doubt that it would be all but forgotten as a familiar part of America's useful currency.
The article clearly shows that the penny is not worth it anymore, Just the cost of making them alone is enough for me to support making the penny obsolete. It is understandable that the poeple of the U.S. would want to keep the penny.It is one of the symbols of America and its prosperous economy, and has an added importance because it has the face of President Abraham Lincoln on it. I believe that removing the penny would be a huge change in America, but i doubt that it would have that much of an impact in the U.S. economy. We could still respect it by having pennies in museums, and I have no doubt that it would become similar to the two dollar bill, unused but highly exciting to find. Another reason to get rid of the penny is that it is not eco friendly. The material used to make the penny is both expensive and damaging to the earth. And how often do Americans actually use a penny? I know that the only time I have actually used a penny to buy something is when I used a penny gumball machine. The removal of the penny would be a change at first but I have no doubt that it would be all but forgotten as a familiar part of America's useful currency.
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Mr. K
The United States should eliminate the penny because it is a worthless coin. Not only do they take extra money to create, they also harm our environment. Using a coin with such little value only creates an extra hassle for American citizens. The government is only wasting money on the penny; this country could most definitely use it on something else, for example, our massive debts. Although some may argue the historic importance of this coin and what it represents to this country, the presidents, especially Lincoln will in no way be forgotten. American Students have a whole entire course dedicated to the history of our country, Lincoln and his achievements toward civil rights most definitely do not go by unrecognized. The nickel, although not as useless as the penny is also a huge waste of money and metals. It would be much smarter decision for our government to round everything up to whole numbers. Not only would this create a more organized money system, it would also save a lot of time for the fast moving society in the United States. In conclusion the penny should be eliminated from the government’s currency because the cons outweigh the pros, proving that the penny is truly a worthless coin.
The United States should eliminate the penny because it is a worthless coin. Not only do they take extra money to create, they also harm our environment. Using a coin with such little value only creates an extra hassle for American citizens. The government is only wasting money on the penny; this country could most definitely use it on something else, for example, our massive debts. Although some may argue the historic importance of this coin and what it represents to this country, the presidents, especially Lincoln will in no way be forgotten. American Students have a whole entire course dedicated to the history of our country, Lincoln and his achievements toward civil rights most definitely do not go by unrecognized. The nickel, although not as useless as the penny is also a huge waste of money and metals. It would be much smarter decision for our government to round everything up to whole numbers. Not only would this create a more organized money system, it would also save a lot of time for the fast moving society in the United States. In conclusion the penny should be eliminated from the government’s currency because the cons outweigh the pros, proving that the penny is truly a worthless coin.
Eliminating the penny is probably the best thing for American economy. It costs about 2.4 cents to just make each penny itself when its only worth 1 cent. The nickel costs 11.5 to make each and it costs only 5 cents. Getting rid of the penny would lower taxes for American tax payers and use that money toward more importance and useful things. Yes, the penny is apart of American history and should always be remember for the reason Abraham Lincoln is the face of the penny. He was the 16th President who freed the slaves, but I think its about time to move on and display it in a museum. Also American technology is very updated in today’s society so most American’s aren’t even using cash anymore. Instead they use computers, credit and debit cards, and also checks to pay. Some people will argue against on why we shouldn’t forget but keep the history alive, But just like other historical items the penny will not be forgotten but instead will save American government money. Were paying to make the pennies for more than there actually worth. Why waste our money when you can use that for more important things?
The elimination of the penny from the American economy can create controversial issues, but we should look at this topic, rationally and practically. Evidence shows that it costs taxpayers about 2.4 cents to make a penny. From what I understand it costs more money to make a penny than the value of the actual coin. I do not think that is very practical. And as the article says the costs of using such coins is even higher. As Benjamin Franklin stated, “time is money.” When a penny is involved in a transaction, most Americans grope for a penny at the bottom of their purse or wallet, which wastes valuable time. Many people lose pennies, throw them away, or do not even bother to collect them and store them in a jar. Also stores pay out more pennies than they receive, so an order is made to make more pennies. However, those pennies will just be disregarded by the American society. The penny has lost its purpose. The fact that so many Americans pay electronically is just an example. In a sense, penny has become a hindrance; it just gets in the way. Mining copper and zinc increases energy use and pollution. It has been extensively advertised in America to constantly “go green.” How can we do that if the penny is continuously being made? Economists have calculated the data and it reveals that there is no significant gap between the number of times prices will be rounded upward and downward. And so the concluding question is “how did the penny become so useless?” Times have changed and our world and society are evolving. In this fast-paced life we live in time is precious, “time is money.”
The thought that many people want to eliminate the penny is completely shocking not because it is a bad idea but that the penny has been a part of our country for a while now. It is iconic and one of our country’s greatest presidents, Mr. Abraham Lincoln, is on the face of it. The idea of eradicating the penny should definitely not be ruled out of consideration though because obviously this article shows that Americans rarely use their pennies in everyday life. To see someone give a cashier exactly $4.82 is extremely rare. Most of the time, they just give them a five dollar bill. However a question to consider is how would you give back the exact change without the penny. One of the the underlying reasons to eliminate the penny is the following: It costs American taxpayers 2.4 cents to make a penny, while the value of the penny is only 1 cent. This is definitely not sensible. However, since our country is in a bit of a financial crisis right now it makes it seem that the only reason president Obama wants tot get rid of the penny is to help stabilize our country. If America does decide to get rid of the penny, it should definitely be immortalized in museums across the country.
As stated in the article, the average American earns a little more than one penny for every two seconds of work. I do believe that it is time to ditch the penny and look outward for new options of fiat money. The article also makes a good reason that it is really not worth all of the time, effort and money we put into making and producing the penny for people to either barely use it because of technology making it easy to pay through your smart phone, or stores wanting too many of them, thus making us have to produce more. People really don’t use the penny that much any more in modern times. As of right now, the penny is found everywhere, making it less of a thing that America can relate to it’s history and foundations. It is said that the penny has a very significant historical background, with “In God we trust” and “Liberty” printed along with Abraham Lincoln’s distinctive profile, yet wouldn’t it be even more significant if it was in a History Museum and not everybody owned one? Just like how older car’s, or dolls become outdated, and people start to collect them, I think it’s time for the penny to get out of our money system.
Like most Americans, I will fight for every cent I'm worth. I deserve every penny I earn, and the amount of pennies earned can amount up to a staggering numberof money which I am not going to allow to slip through my fingers out of laziness. While the materials used to make pennies should be changed or altered in order to make it worth it's time and to help the enviromant. If we got rid of the penny our shole currency would get a little off balance. Would there no longer be any value 0 and 5 and 5 and 10? We would have to rethink the value of every marketbale item in the world. And then in order to change to these prices we would either have to round up or round down prices. If we rounded up then the consumer would be cheated, but if we rounded down the Manufactor will be cheated. When you find a penny face up it's considered good luck, the penny has always been that warm reminder that we will always see on te streets, save in jars and count our carefully to buy gas when we leave our wallets at home. The penny is symbolic and necessary and isn't going anywhere anytime soon.
Mike Garr
APUSH
4-15-12
The penny is currently being debated on whether or not it is of use and whether or not it should be kept in America's economic system; I, myself, have barely used the penny, and after reading this article, I think I can say that I agree with it and that the penny should be expelled from the U.S. economic system. In the article, the author had explained that it costs taxpayers 2.4 cents to fabricate a penny, and one of the ideas to solve this issue was to find a new metal to make the penny with. In my opinion, it would be much easier on the taxpayers if the penny was eliminated, because it would save the taxpayers 2.4 cents on every penny made. Also, eliminating the penny would end the difficulty of finding another metal to make the penny with, and it could possibly make congress focus more on finding another metal to make the nickel with, thus saving more money for the taxpayers. Another issue brought up in the article was how costs will round up or down to the nearest five cents; this is looked at as a loss because it is thought that most costs would end up having to be rounded up, for example, something that is priced at $4.99 would cost the buyer $5.00 resulting in a one cent loss for the buyer. However, in the article, the author had tested this out by checking the record of costs at a store, and proved that there would be more prices rounded down than rounded up. People also need to understand that tax will play a big role in the outcome of the cost, and that it all depends how money is spent. Therefore, the penny be should be ejected from the American economic system.
Pennies are completely useless, unless there is a need for exact change. It costs approximately 2.4ents to make a penny, which is obviously over 200 percent more exspensive than the actual coin itself. But if we eliminatede the penny, the smallest coin would be a nickle which, granted, is worth more than a penny, but it also costs approximately 11 cents to make, which is again 200 percent more exspensive than the actual coin. Some people say that we should keep using the penny because it is a part of history, and if that's the case then we should use telegraphing systems, because they are a part of history. Which is just plain silly, if we have bigger, better, cheaper, more useful resources then why should we keep using the old ones? The penny can me put in some museam somewhere and will never be "forgotten" or "swept under the rug." If we stop the usage of pennies, then we could recycle them and make different objects. Granted, prices of more common necessities would be raised a few pennies. But everyone knows that the penny is absolutely worthless, which is why we find them laying in the middle of the street. You rarely ever see paper money just floating around.
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