Should the penny be abolished?

President Trump has ordered a halt to the production of new pennies, writing in a Truth Social post: “For far too long the United States has minted pennies which literally cost us more than 2 cents.” He added, “Let’s rip the waste out of our great nation’s budget, even if it’s a penny at a time.”

Journalist Caity Weaver agrees. In her seven-thousand-word manifesto for New York Times Magazine last weekend, she notes that the US government lost over $94 million last year minting billions of pennies, which are used mostly as change for cash purchases ending with .99. She states that the vast majority are destined for coin oblivion, abandoned by Americans who have no reason to carry currency of such little value.

I’m one of these Americans. I cannot remember the last time I carried pennies in my pocket any longer than it took to discard them somewhere. I once kept them in a large can until I could dump them into one of the currency exchange machines you see at grocery stores. The can almost weighed more than I could carry, but the entire exercise returned less than $20. I haven’t tried it again.

You are probably like me, glad for a day when you won’t have to deal with the pesky (and often dirty) little discs. But there’s more to our story.

What will become of penny loafers?

Artazn is a Tennessee metal manufacturer and the government’s sole supplier of the zinc blanks used to make penny coins (which are 98 percent zinc coated with copper). The company has raised $1 billion in revenue since 2008 from selling its zinc discs to the US Mint.

Weaver reports that Artazn’s lobbying on Capitol Hill is the main reason the penny endures, according to retired US Mint Spokesperson Tom Jurkowsky and other sources. The company sponsors the advocacy group Americans For Common Cents (which, I’ll admit, is a catchy name). The group argues:

• Abolishing the penny would negatively impact low-income people by causing stores to round up prices.
• Charities such as the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society rely on penny donations for fundraising.
• Polls show that the majority of Americans want to keep the penny.

In addition, some worry that ending the penny would cause the government to produce more nickels, which are even more expensive to produce (nearly three times their value).

However, penny abolitionists point out that cash usage is declining. They state that while some totals would be rounded up by one or two cents, others would be rounded down. They point to Canadian consumers, who have adjusted to the rounding system implemented when their country stopped minting its one-cent coin in 2013. And they remind us that the US previously stopped minting the half-cent coin at a time when it was worth more than today’s penny.

Polls show that Americans support ending penny production when they learn how much it costs to make them. And charities such as the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society say they no longer rely on coin drives, using credit card payment roundups to fundraise.

As Bob Greene notes in the Wall Street Journal, there are already 240 billion pennies in circulation, so it’s not as if they will magically disappear if the US Mint stops making new ones. And there’s the nostalgia factor, according to Greene:

A penny could never buy you much, but it could buy you something: It was no coincidence that drugstores placed penny-a-crank gumball machines near their front doors, knowing that the colorful sight would extract the departing customers’ last cents. Penny arcades promised pleasure on a budget. The penny loafer, with slits on each shoe for the coin, went from utilitarian to sublime because of it.

Why squirrels don’t market acorns

Money is a strange thing: It has no great value apart from that which is assigned to it. Even the value of gold is cultural: because it doesn’t tarnish, people felt it held its value over other precious metals, but it has little intrinsic worth of its own. You can’t eat or drink it; it’s too malleable to be a serviceable weapon and too soft to work well as cookware.

Paper money is even less valuable on its own merits. It’s more sophisticated than typical paper, composed of 25 percent linen and 75 percent cotton, with red and blue fibers distributed randomly throughout to make copying more difficult. But its real value lies in the numbers printed on it. And those numbers, since they are no longer tied to the gold standard, are rather hypothetical themselves.

Obviously, no other species but homo sapiens uses currency. You don’t see dogs saving bones to trade for meat or squirrels marketing their acorns to the highest bidder. But there’s another fact related to humans and money: unlike the latter, the former possess intrinsic worth beyond description.

Humans invented the laptop on which I’m typing these words and the technology by which you’re reading them. Humans figured out how to travel to the moon and mine the oceans. Humans have eradicated diseases and doubled their lifespan in the last century.

As the only species made in God’s image (Genesis 1:27), such intrinsic capacity is to be expected. But here’s the catch: like currency, our ultimate worth is determined by our maker, not by ourselves.

“Truth has stumbled in the public squares”

We are living longer lives than our ancestors, but we are no less mortal than them. We don’t die of some of the diseases that threatened them, but we face diseases like COVID-19 that they did not. And nothing we can make can fill the “God-shaped emptiness” with which we are made.

Just today I was reading Isaiah 59, where the prophet says to us,

Your iniquities have made a separation between you and your God, and your sins have hidden his face from you so that he does not hear. For your hands are defiled with blood and your fingers with iniquity; your lips have spoken lies; your tongue mutters wickedness. . . . Truth has stumbled in the public squares, and uprightness cannot enter (vv. 2–3, 14).

This is why Jesus “was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed” (Isaiah 53:5). However, our Savior grieved that so many in his day and ours “refuse to come to me that you may have life” (John 5:40).

Instead, the Lord declared, “My people have committed two evils: they have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and hewed out cisterns for themselves, broken cisterns that can hold no water” (Jeremiah 2:13). This is why Jesus calls to us, “If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, ‘Out of his heart will flow rivers of living water’” (John 7:37–38).

His invitation is still open: “Let the one who is thirsty come; let the one who desires take the water of life without price” (Revelation 22:17).

“No one can serve two masters”

The great deception of money is the false claim that having more of it makes us more valuable. Our best response is to use the material for the spiritual and the temporal for the eternal. Jesus was blunt:

“No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money” (Matthew 6:24).

Which would God say you are serving today?