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According to an old superstition, it’s good luck to find a penny on the sidewalk. But whether or not you believe picking up that penny will bring you luck, one thing it definitely won’t bring you is wealth. Pennies are worth so little now that by taking five seconds to pick one up isn’t even worth it. Pennies are so close to worthless that many people, including me, argue it’s time to do away with them altogether. Pennies are pretty much useless and a waste of time. Today, there’s literally nothing you can buy with a single penny – and you can’t do much else with it either.
Vending machines don’t accept them, and neither do most parking meters. Even automatic toll booths won’t take them And if a single penny is useless, a whole bunch of pennies isn’t much better.If you try paying for something in a store with a fistful of pennies, you can expect dirty looks from both the clerk and the other customers – if the store doesn’t just flatout refuse to take them. Pennies are so hard to spend that many people don’t even bother – they just store them all in jars, or even throw them away. If you do use pennies than you usually spend up to 2.4 hours counting and sorting them out,which if you ask me, is a pretty boring way of spending your time. These one cent also cost the government a lot of money. It now costs about 1.6 cents – to make one cent. That means whenever the Mint produces a penny and sends it out to a bank, it’s actually losing money on the deal.
Of course, spending 1.6 cents to make a coin that’s worth only 1 isn’t really a bad idea, because coins are reusable. A single penny could be used for hundreds, thousands, or even millions of transactions before it drops out of use. However, this only works if the coins are actually used – and pennies, as noted above, often aren't.They’re so hard to use that they end up stuffed in jars or abandoned on sidewalks. This also means that the money we lose is going to waste because it can be used for something more important.
For example, bettering the schools system, buying better military equipment or even funding a new space station. Many people argue that even though pennies seem useless many charities rely on them.I would like to point out that if the U.S. Mint stops producing pennies, they won’t simply lose their value overnight.Instead, the coins will be gradually pulled out of circulation.
However, stores will no longer be required to accept pennies – so consumers will have even more incentive to donate the coins to charity, since they won’t be able to use them anywhere else. Also once pennies drop out of circulation, the nickel will become the lowest-value coin cluttering up people’s pockets. So instead of penny drives, charities could start holding nickel drives, putting out bottles or wishing fountains to collect the new “useless” coins. And since each nickel is worth five times as much as a penny, charities would gather five times as much money with each spare coin tossed into the jar. As you can see there are many reasons as to why the penny should be discontinued. Keeping the penny would cost us more than it’s worth and stop us from using the wasted money on things that would protect our country and even help it grow.
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