A few weeks ago the US Mint revealed a new design for the back of pennies. From what I’ve seen so far, every story that has covered it (two examples) feels the need to wonder aloud why we still have pennies at all, especially since due to the wonders of inflation, it’s worth far less than other coins (such as the half penny) which have been phased out. To my mind, there are two really obvious reasons to keep pennies.
The first is a simple matter of aesthetics, it seems silly to have the second decimal place when denoting our currency but to only use it for a 5 or 0 (which you would be stuck with, because I’m imagining people will continue to want the ability to pay with cash for a while yet, and will get bitter about being screwed out of 4 cents every time they don’t have perfect change). Having just a 5 or 0 there breaks the whole base ten system, because the second decimal place becomes base 2 modulo 5 (I think, bit of number theory there for you).
The second is taxes. People fight back (and rightly so) when a single cent sales tax increase is proposed for something they don’t like. Can you imagine trying to pass a local option sales tax for schools or roads or whatever if instead of a 1 cent increase, you had to make it a 5 cent increase? (Admittedly I don’t really understand how they calculate sales tax currently, which in Minneapolis is something like 7.775% (thanks new Twins Stadium for that last .015%). )
And aside from all of that, there’s some incredibly successful people out there with a certain, shall we say, affinity for pennies, and I for one don’t want to make some one like this angry:
| Upright Citizens Brigade | ||||
| Ass Pennies | ||||
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A side note – a roll of pennies is 50 cents, so $30 in pennies is 60 rolls, a day. Ow.
Also, I still like my strategy better.