Sunday, December 11, 2011

Death to Pennies

Why Pennies are economically inefficient and should be abolished.

he story of the penny starts in the first US Mint founded in 1792 which produced these one-cent pieces along with other coins including the Quarter, Dime, Half Dime and a mystery coin that we’ll get back to later.

These pennies of the new republic were born of 100% pure copper.

But, two forces conspired to ensure this wouldn’t remain the case for long. The value of copper went up and, because of inflation, the buying power of the penny went down.

This caused The Mint to reduce the amount of copper in pennies, first from 100% to 95%, and then to only 5% copper and 95% zinc.

Despite this debasement, in 2006 the value of the metal in older pennies rose over 1 cent and suddenly they were worth more dead than alive so people melted them to sell the raw copper for profit. Read more.....

No comments:

Post a Comment

Everyone is encouraged to participate with civilized comments.