William Safire wrote:
The time has come to abolish the outdated, almost worthless,
bothersome and wasteful penny.

Bravo!

Why is the U.S. among the last of the industrialized nations to
abolish the peskiest little bits of coinage? At the G-8 summit next
week, the Brits and the French - even the French! - who dumped their
low-denomination coins 30 years ago, will be laughing at our
senseless jingling.

Going euro has actually been a step backward for many countries who long
before got rid of their useless denominations. IIRC, only Finland has
actively discouraged the use of the one and two euro-cent coins. Of
course, it was a step up for Germany, which was still circulating one
pfennig coins. The US may be among the last -- but we are not the very
last. Canada still has one cent coins that are even more worthless than
ours.

The penny-pinching horde argues: those $9.98 price tags save the
consumer 2 cents because if the penny was abolished, merchants would
"round up" to the nearest dollar. That's pound-foolish: the idea
behind the 98-cent (and I can't even find a cent symbol on my
keyboard any more) price is to fool you into thinking that "it's less
than 10 bucks." In truth, merchants would round down to $9.95, saving
the consumer billions of paper dollars over the next century.

Actually, this is not the case. Safire makes the classic mistake of
assuming that cent coin elimination also mandates elimination of the
denomination of one cent -- it does not. Merchants are still free to
price their wares at $9.98 -- indeed, will do so more frequently as the
consumer who buys just one item will end up paying $10.00. However,
random purchases of random quantities of items over time will cancel out
these two cent gains, and I suspect merchants will price their goods no
differently than they do today.

The answer, I think, has to do with zinc, which is what pennies are
mostly made of; light copper plating turns them into red cents. The
powerful, outsourcing zinc lobby - financed by Canadian mines as well
as Alaskan - entices front groups to whip up a frenzy of
save-the-penny mail to Congress when coin reform is proposed.

Ding! Ding! Ding! You got it, Bill. It's all about the zinc.

But when the penny is abolished, the nickel will boom. And what is a
nickel made of? No, not the metallic element nickel; our 5-cent coin
is mainly composed of copper. And where is most of America's copper
mined? Arizona. If Senator John McCain would get off President Bush's
back long enough to serve the economic interests of his Arizona
constituents, we'd get some long-overdue coin reform.

I doubt McCain cares much about copper, but I also question this copper
"boom". I don't see why any increase of nickel production would be
necessary with cent elimination.

What frazzled pollsters, surly op-ed pages, snarling cable talkfests
and issue-starved candidates for office need is a fresh source of
hot-eyed national polarization. Coin reform can close the controversy
gap and fill the vitriol void. Get out those bumper stickers: Abolish
the penny!

This year it will most likely cost more than one cent to make a penny.
It already costs more to get them circulating. And the cost of wasted
productivity to businesses is immeasurable. I think we can suffer them
up to 2009, which will be the centennial of the Lincoln cent and the
bicentennial of Lincoln's birth. If I were king, I'd make 2008 be the
last year of circulating cents, and make a special commemorative cent
for 2009, and then no more.

--
Bob