When the first penny was struck by the U.S. Mint, back in 1793, it had the 2025 equivalent purchasing power of 33 cents, so, more than a quarter, from the way we look at it today.
Made sense, back then, to have a bunch of coins with the value of what we know have in our quarter in circulation.
Now, obviously, a penny is worth a mere one cent, and since it costs 3.69 cents to produce a single penny, yes, it makes absolutely no sense, that we would keep minting pennies at a big loss.
The U.S. Mint, as of last week, is officially out of the penny business.
The decision was made, that we can’t keep losing money there.
How big a loss was the penny to the bottom line? According to the U.S. Mint itself, it produced 3.2 billion new pennies in fiscal-year 2024.
Doing the math on that, that’s at a cost of $118 million – and a loss of $86 million.
Now, that was less than a half-percent of our $1.8 trillion budget deficit for FY 2024 – about half a penny on a hundred dollars, as it were.
Anyway, that’s more money for us to send to Argentina.
Seriously, like we’re going to give it to SNAP or Obamacare subsidies.
The confusing thing to come: what we do with regard to pennies in the meantime.
They’re still legal tender, so if you still pay with cash, you can still get them back in change.
Otherwise, we just round up, or down.
The idea is, it will all even out.
You can still roll them up and take them to the bank, or the CoinStar machine at the grocery store.
I presume. People still do that, don’t they?
The U.S. Mint estimates there are still 300 billion pennies in circulation – that’s $3 billion worth.
Another way to look at 300 billion pennies: 300 billion pennies weighs a collective 1.65 billion pounds.
Long after humans have gone the way of the dinosaurs, the earth will have the American penny to have to deal with.
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Chris Graham
