President Trump wants to ditch the penny, a move that some experts say is long overdue. Advocates of the least-valuable coin say it should stick around. WSJ examines the question of whether or not it makes sense to get rid of the penny.The cost of minting pennies and the possibility of no longer doing so is a story I tell my students, usually in the context of using pennies as references for hardness of minerals. What makes this problematic is that the penny has changed in composition over time.
The penny has always been assigned a hardness of around 3. But we have conducted tests and found this is not true.Each of these changes made pennies cheaper to produce. To make them even cheaper, the U.S. would have to make them out of steel, like we did in 1943. Those became collectors items, but I don't know if most Americans would accept such a different looking coin when we're not in a world war. It might be easier to stop minting them.
The penny has changed in composition over the years since 1909 when the first Lincoln cent was issued. Its composition was specified as 95 percent copper and 5 percent tin plus zinc, an alloy classified as bronze. Except for the wartime year of 1943, pennies were bronze from 1909 until 1962. Pennies for the following 20 years were copper and zinc, technically brass rather than bronze. And in 1982 the proportions were reversed so that pennies today are 97.5 percent zinc surrounded by a thin, thin copper shell.
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The Indian head penny had the same nominal composition as the Lincoln penny, with zinc and tin combined making up 5 percent, but we suspect that the older penny had a little more tin. Maybe one penny isn't a fair test.
The Wall Street Journal mentioned that Canada had abandoned pennies in 2012, so I'm turning to CBC News asking Is Trump right about eliminating the penny? | About That.
President Donald Trump wants the U.S. Mint to stop making new pennies, but is the one-cent coin really more trouble than it's worth? Andrew Chang explains.Based on the Canadian experience, ceasing to mint pennies might actually be a good idea. Chalk that up to a stuck clock being right twice a day, and Hoover Cleveland is definitely a stuck clock. The other issue he might be right on? Ending Daylight Saving Time, which will be a subject for next month. In the meantime, stay tuned for the Sunday entertainment feature. Awards season, anyone?