Abolish the Penny Essay

Abolishing the Penny: The biggest questions now days are,” Should the penny really be abolished and why is the penny still in route like its ten or five cents? ” It’s been our smallest-denomination coin for 150 years. But if people are leaving pennies at the cash register, is it time to get rid of them? In this essay I am going to argue why we should keep the penny and why people think the penny should stay in route with the rest of the coins. Also why or why not we should keep the penny and if we didn’t where would the penny go?

What made me want to argue my opinion versus the Harvard professor of Economics Gregory Mankiw who believes that the penny should be abolished is because the penny helps a lot of people survive the long way. I felt like this was a much needed topic to talk about because some people who have money no matter if they are in the lower class through higher class living situations are acting like pennies don’t or won’t affect them if it was to disappear. I still use pennies and collect them until I feel like it’s a lot of money to go cash them in; it’s a good way to save money too.

Whether we use the penny on the regular like we use quarters, nickels, and dimes shouldn’t matter because it’s still being circulated in cash flow. . Most cash transactions involve the exchange of pennies, and this increases the time it takes to complete them. Also some people are saying that the penny should be abolished because it’s just taking up space in the currency flow. I don’t believe that the penny is taking up space because it works as if it was a quarter, nickel, or dime in some places.

For example when you don’t have the needed change, you would turn to the penny. Some people say minting pennies is a waste of money. They say the penny has out lived its usefulness so we should retire it, but I believe the penny has more life in it still because people is the US still use it unlike Canada and few other states or countries.

Gregory Mankiw points out, “When people start leaving a monetary unit at the cash register for the next customer, the unit is too small to be useful. ” But some people just leave the pennies there because they don’t feel like waiting for the cashiers to count it out. Statistics show that the U. S. Mint produces about 7 billion pennies a year at a cost of $100 million dollars.

Pennies are made of copper and zinc, two metals that have recently soared in price. Because of the high value of those metals, a penny is worth more melted down than as U. S. currency. “A simple way to retire the penny would be to round each cash transaction to the nearest nickel”, but why would you want to round to the nearest nickel, that’s spending more money though. I don’t believe that we should abolish the penny because it’s been around for so long, if we were to abolish the penny what would we use to break five, ten , or odd numbers of cents. It’s also illegal to melt pennies. Abolishing the penny would not save the government money.

Without the penny, the U. S. Mint would produce more nickels. Due to soaring metal prices, the nickel costs almost 10 cents to produce. Spending more money to produce more nickels is no way to save money. In conclusion to my argument as well as my opinion versus the Harvard professor of Economics Gregory Mankiw who believes that the penny should be abolished, has been clearly stated that the penny should not be abolished for plenty of reasons and the penny should stay in circulation with the rest of the currency. My opinion still stands strong as to why we should keep the penny and what would happen if the penny was to disappear.