Hi, folks. I'm back again, nearly 20 years after beginning this blog. Blogs are definitely on the way out; I just noticed that none of the blogs I follow are still active. But as I monitor traffic to this blog, I see that, although it long since slowed to a shadow of its former self, readers do continue to trickle in. One of the artiles that have attracted interest is this one, on the demise of the penny. In the decade and a half since then, the Lincoln Head penny hasn't disappeared after all, even though the US Mint now has to produce it at a loss. I've thought about this, and have come up with two reasons why this could be so.
First of all, cash has increasingly become irrelevant in modern commerce. A woman recently posted that she hasn't written a check in years, and to a large extent this can also be said of cash. Most people go weeks or months at a time without ever touching a penny, which makes their very existence almost unneccesary.
Secondly, the expense of minting the few pennies that are needed to grease the wheels of commerce is negligible in the face of a multi trillion dollar federal budget: you can think of it as an advertising expense for keeping up the illusion that the US's fiat money is actually worth anything.
So, when will the penny eventually go away? I now predict that it will stay on, until cash is eliminated entirely--something I actually hinted at before, as a possibility. Once that happens, pennies will continue to have value as collector's items, but they will no longer circulate as legal tender. And even if owning them becomes a crime, few people will consider it worth the bother to turn them in, so it's likely a lot of them will just get buried. Future civilizations may wonder at these hoards.
