I have a question for you. How much does it cost to make an individual penny? Also, how many are made each year? (OK, so it’s more than one question.) Are they ever going to stop manufacturing them?
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A lot of people have been wondering about this. The mint makes something like 13 billion pennies a year, accounting for two-thirds of all U.S. coinage. Half of these pennies will disappear from circulation within a year, having been squirreled away in penny jars and who knows where else. The U.S. General Accounting Office estimates that of the roughly 170 billion pennies currently in existence two-thirds have been effectively withdrawn from circulation by people who think they’re too much trouble to carry around. The penny has by far the lowest seigniorage (profit) rate of any U.S. coin. Each costs four-fifths of a cent to make, netting Uncle Sam just one-fifth of a cent, or 20 percent. The profit on a quarter, by comparison, is more than 20 cents–80 percent. Were the penny still made mostly of copper, as it was until 1982, the government would have to manufacture them at a loss. (The coins are now copper-plated zinc.) The time has come to ask–hell, it came long ago–Why are we doing this, anyway?
Too bad. The arguments in favor of retaining the penny are weak, arising from the same wellspring of nostalgia and we’ve-always-done-it-this-way inertia that’s hindered conversion to the metric system. The real question is not whether the government makes money on pennies but whether the coin serves any commercial purpose. The “take a penny, leave a penny” jars that many merchants keep by their cash registers suggest strongly that it doesn’t. If people don’t want to make change with pennies, why bother?
I wondered about this myself when I was a sprout. Saint Fe? Patron saint of truck-stop waitresses? But eventually I got a clue. “Santa” can also mean holy, and “fe” means faith, so Santa Fe = holy faith.
