Did I say penis? My bad, I meant pennies.
I was on the train today and with nothing better to do I was browsing the TIL sector of reddit and learnt a cool fact about th U.S. pennies
The U.S. government incurs a yearly loss of $110 million from them
Turns out that minting pennies costs a lot of money, with the US incurring a loss of over 100 millions to issue them. Each and every year. That's the total cost btw, after you account the metals, the labor, security measures, transferring, packaging etc etc.
That's a lot of pennies!
Especially for a coin many don't use or want:
According to a national survey conducted in January 2017 by the polling team of Hart Research Associates and Public Opinion Strategies on behalf of the Dollar Coin Alliance, there is broad support for eliminating the penny. The Hart/POS survey found that 77 percent of voters support suspending production of the penny. When told of the savings made by suspending the penny, support jumped to 84 percent source
To give you some more specific numbers, a penny in 2023 had a cost of 3.07 cents while a nickel had a cost of 11.54 cents! While in 2022, a penny had a cost 2.72 cents and a nickel $0.1041.
The same is was true for other countries and this is why they stopped minting them. New Zealand is such an example.
So why production of these coins keeps going on? Well there are many arguments but after doing some reading I think the only one that makes sense is the lack of political willingness, mostly due to pressure from the metal lobbies. And maybe some silly boomers that like their coins 😄
Funnily, even the melting value of some old pennies is worth more than 1 cent. Theoretically, you could make an "easy" buck collecting a bunch and destroying them for scrap but that is illegal. However, you are allowed to melt them for crafting stuff, make jewels or other artistic purposes.
Anyways, you can read more on the whole penny issue here
What about you? Do you like your penis pennies? I bet @pocketechange does! 😄