The Free Press
On Sunday, President Donald Trump announced that he has ordered his administration to cease production of the penny. The argument for the move seems straightforward enough. It costs more than a penny to make a penny (3.7 cents, according to the U.S. Mint). Given inflation and the move to digital payments, ditching the coin is just common cents, right?
Not necessarily. Life’s about more than just making the numbers add up, and amid all the government waste, doesn’t the humble penny deserve a carve out for sentimental reasons?
Today, we debate the penny’s fate. Good riddance or gone too soon? Deputy Editor Charles Lane supports Trump’s move. Consulting Editor Jonathan Rosen opposes it. Have at it, gentleman.
Charles Lane: President Trump’s decision to end production of the penny has my total support. This mite of a coin betrayed me, quite directly and personally, over the course of 13 years.
“Save your pennies, Chuck,” a supervisor at work told me in 2002, responding to some angst I expressed about future college tuition costs. This was her way of not getting the hint that I needed a raise.
Attitudinally positive as always, I took her advice. I told my 5-year-old son that we would henceforth be keeping every one-cent coin we received as change, found on the street, or won playing dreidel until the moment he left for college.
What a father-son project! So rich in lessons about thrift, consistency, and long-term thinking! And so we collected and collected, filling first one large glass jug and then another, until July 2015, when it was time for the big reveal: We had accumulated 10,142 pennies, about 2.19 per day.
They were worth $101.42, not even enough to cover a month’s fraternity dues.
Wrapping the little suckers in paper rolls to enable deposit at a bank took me several days. Valued at the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour, the time wasted offset any wealth embodied in our hoard—with change left over.
So I did not need the DOGE to tell me the government lost over $179 million in fiscal year 2023 minting more than 4.5 billion one-cent pieces at a cost of three-plus cents each. I already knew that a penny is much more trouble than it’s worth.
Jonathan Rosen: Ah, but your accounting is off! (Though I say this as someone who has trouble balancing a checkbook, another outmoded artifact we can argue about another day.) I realize starting off a defense of the penny by quoting a credit card commercial is bad form, but all the things you described doing with your son are priceless.
Perhaps it is because I grew up watching the musical Mary Poppins. The little boy has tuppence (okay that’s two cents, but still), and all he wants to do is buy birdseed from the scary old woman who sells it. Instead, he has to go to the bank, where the scary old man who runs the bank tells him to invest his tuppence. Thrift. Prudence. Et cetera.
Soon, the boy is told, he will be “part of railways through Africa” and “dams across the Nile.” You don’t have to be a campus radical to realize where that’s going. Accordingly, the kid grabs his money and runs all the way to the bird lady where he buys: happiness. Or at least, birdseed, so he can feed the pigeons—which is a mistake, but perhaps he graduates to finches at some point. Anyway, “chicken feed” is an insulting term unless you’re a farmer and want eggs.
The point is that pennies do not take the place of real money! They do something else. Hence the song: “Pennies from Heaven.” Salaries come from someplace else.
CL: Jonathan, would it change anything if I told you that, by the time he was old enough for college, my son was 18 and had lost interest in this charming activity? The only one sprawled on the floor—counting, rolling, and wrapping—was me.
But we’re getting off topic. Speaking of real money, that’s the issue at hand, and the government should not tax people to subsidize whatever traditionalist frisson the penny still provides. There are 250 billion or so of the one cent-ers still rattling around out there, more than enough to meet whatever psychological need anyone might have without producing 3.2 billion new ones, as the U.S. Mint did last year.
If I have any complaint about Trump’s anti-penny decree, it is that it doesn’t go far enough. The U.S. government is also underwater on the nickel, which cost 13.8 cents apiece to produce in 2024, according to the U.S. Mint.
These two coins are basically government-sponsored nuisances at this point. Society has moved on to digital payments; cash payments, whether in paper or metal, accounted for only 16 percent of all transactions in 2024, according to the Federal Reserve.
I’m a traditionalist, just not an unconditional one.
JR: I think you need to wait 10 or 20 years, when your son returns to the penny, before you’ll know what you bequeathed him.
As you say, we are ranging a bit far afield. That was certainly my intention, because I am not trying to make a solid economic argument here. On the other hand, there was a recent debate about presidential meme coins that made me think I should hold onto every three-dimensional piece of currency I can find until I understand the meaning of this fairy money.
I’d note—perhaps more practically, though I only read it yesterday—that overall the mint is profitable, and it seems that pennies and nickels, for which there is still demand, sustain interest in the larger values. But here you are already getting rid of the nickel when we haven’t even buried the penny!
Frankly, if it really costs almost 14 cents to produce one nickel, perhaps we should start with that, since it only costs three cents to make a penny; you’re just not going to find a cheaper government-sponsored nuisance than that.
I’ve also read that if we stopped making pennies we’d need to make more nickels, and since nickels cost more to make than pennies, in the end, killing the penny would cost the country more.
But neither my heart nor my piggy bank are in these arguments. An article I read some years back arguing for the end of the penny—and they run one every year—said that most “penny patriots” work for the zinc lobby, which I do not, or are “people with vivid imaginations.” Though I prefer “vivid imagination” to “unconditional traditionalist,” my reasons also involve my children, who collected pennies for various charitable causes. This had less to do with the return value than the ease with which people found something to contribute in almost every apartment, which was also a lesson in charity.
One more point connected to, but not limited to, my children. It has to do with coins as civic lessons, starting with Abraham Lincoln, the president who knit the union together and presided over a second founding. I don’t know if they teach civics anymore, but there’s a new birth of freedom in your pocket for a penny!
There are 250 billion tiny Lincoln Memorials that cannot be defaced or torn down. Perhaps we don’t need more than 250 billion, as you say, but there’s something about the commitment to produce them in unstable times that I feel grateful for. And they all say “E pluribus unum” and “In God we trust.” The founding theology of America requires both those mottos. Without “In God we trust,” even if it was only added to money during the Cold War, there wouldn’t be the Declaration of Independence’s “All men are created equal,” which is derived from the idea that diverse humanity is made in the image of one Creator, which is why we are all endowed with unalienable rights. If the many hadn’t come from the One, then the one made out of the many wouldn’t be We the People, with its combination of collective sovereignty and individual rights, an old idea that needs to be made new in every generation. Might as well start with the penny. Now what would you pay?
CL: You make a fair and original point about the little civics lesson each coin embodies. My problem with it is that all the other coins will still be out there to impart a similar message, not to mention the $5 bill, which has Lincoln, “In God we trust,” and the memorial on it, too. It’s also easier to read.
The lesson that feels both urgent and teachable in this context is about thrift—national thrift. We can’t have everything; to govern is to choose, as the saying goes. Given all the other important things the government could do with $179 million, and given that it is, or should be, up to the schools to teach civics, the penny seems expendable. (I’m perfectly happy to let the even less cost-effective nickel go first, though.)
JR: You are right, of course, that schools ought to teach civics. But since I’m told nearly a billion dollars have been cut from the Department of Education, perhaps a small subvention might be saved for the penny, which is a little fleck of portable history that, for multisensory learners like me, can be held in the hand. In this increasingly virtual world I cannot help craving tangible markers that liberate me, at least a little, into concrete reality.
I realize that important economic advances involve an element of abstraction. (I have a vague recollection of learning how “double-entry bookkeeping” changed the world.) So it may be entirely for personal, sentimental, or remedial reasons that I’d like to save the penny.
I cannot help believing that even if a penny saved is no longer a penny earned, he might yet consider it “an investment in knowledge,” which, as Benjamin Franklin said, “always pays the best interest.”
CL: Great point about the zinc lobby, Jonathan, which raises another difficulty in this whole debate: There are precious few disinterested parties, and the interested ones’ Washington reps have made an art out of manipulating all the what-ifs and imponderables, the better to stymie action. I almost favor Trump’s move regardless of the merits—just because it shows that the government is capable of making a controversial decision once in a while.
The paper and currency-printing lobbies—“Americans for George” was their short-lived Astroturf organization—stopped Congress from replacing the $1 bill with a coin a while back. I strongly supported that, too, until 2019, when a new Government Accountability Office study determined that it would actually lose the government money over 30 years.
So you see, Jonathan, I am open to persuasion—just not about the penny. At least, not today.
