The government in Canada is making plans to get rid of its one-cent coin.

The United States ought to follow that lead. Pennies cost more to make than they are worth, they create clutter, and they are time-consuming to count. Eliminating this coin isn’t a new idea, but it has been successfully resisted, in part because of lobbying efforts by mining companies and the manufacturers of coin-counting machines.

With all the discussions of budget cuts and people on government payrolls losing their jobs, it’s astonishing that the expensive and not very useful penny manages to survive. According to recent reports, it costs the government 2.41 cents to make and distribute each one.

And what happens to most pennies? Perhaps they end up in a change jar on someone’s dresser, where they might eventually be transported to a bank and put back into circulation. Perhaps they’ll just be forgotten in the bottom of a drawer, where they’ll stay until they become part of someone’s estate. The really lucky pennies might find themselves in a dish beside the cash register at a convenience store. There clerks will draw from the dish as needed to make transactions easier (meaning penny-free), and customers may even donate the pennies they find in their pockets. The penny dish at stores is good evidence how much people care about pennies: not much.

Canada’s plan is to just stop making pennies and letting the ones that are in circulation stay in circulation until they disappear. Prices no doubt will adjust as pennies become more scarce.

Many countries have made similar moves, including Norway,

Sweden, Finland, The Netherlands, New Zealand and Australia.

The U.S. Mint has been authorized to study if making pennies out of different metals might save money, but it would make a lot more sense to study some of these other countries’ experiences with eliminating pennies.

There may be another advantage. While there are certainly arguments for and against keeping the penny, the arguments don’t really follow a particular ideology. The pro- and antipenny arguments won’t necessarily follow our usual partisan fault lines. In other words, it’s an issue we can discuss without necessarily reinforcing already wide political divisions. In fact, it might be something that produces bipartisan agreement.

For that alone, eliminating the penny is worth a try.

— Kenosha (Wis.) News

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