In Which I Disagree with John Green about Pennies

I don't always disagree with John Green, but when I do its about pennies. Recently, I took the Nerdfighter census and one of the last questions was something like 'which issues are most important to you', and one of the options was pennies. Now, I didn't check the pennies box, not because I don't think it's important, but because, I believe that we should keep the penny.

For those of you who have never heard of John Green (hey, it's possible), he's a vlogger/author/youtube activist/awesome person/a lot of other things too. Anyway, John has made severeal videos about why the U.S. should eliminate pennies. Basically, his point is that it costs about 2.41 cents to make one penny and they're not a very useful form of currency anyways. While this is fundamentally true, I would argue that it's not a good reason to eliminate the penny.

First of all, in terms of the penny costing more than it's worth to produce, so what? The nickel costs 11.2 cents to produce, the dime costs 5.65 cents, the quarter costs 11.14 cents, the dollar coin costs 18.03 cents, and the dollar bill costs 5.4 cents to make. You think that these sorts of things balance themselves out? Out of all the money that the U.S. produces, only the nickel and the penny cost more to make than they're worth. On every other piece of currency, the U.S. treasury is essentially making a profit. You would think that the government could  just bite the bullet and spend a little more on the penny and the nickel.

Which also leads me to the point that, if you're going to eliminate the penny because it costs too much, you have to eliminate the nickel too. That's a slippery slope. By that logic, we could end up eliminating all coins. The idea of eliminating cash, even in the form of a penny, makes me nervous. You can't have a world without cash. You need something physical to back up your money. Plus, the price of metal changes over time, so, there's no guarantee that the penny is always going to be so expensive.

And, going back to the whole nickel thing, if we take away the penny, we're going to have to round all the prices up to the nearest multiple of five. It just doesn't make sense that something can't cost 99 cents. It may not seem like much money, but, over time, it would add up to a lot. Also, consider the impact that would have when calculating interest.

Anyway, besides the financial side of things, the penny is also a huge cultural symbol. The penny is the most distinctive of the coins, it's a different color from the other coins, and it has Lincoln's face on it. If you get rid of the penny, Lincoln's not going to have a coin. I even have penny earrings! Come on, everyone likes Lincoln! Like, if penny's didn't exist, how would we make souvenir pennies.What would we have instead, souvenir dimes.

Actually, that's a pretty good idea.

Just sayin'