New Penny: Lincoln Love Helps Keep Waste Alive

How many pennies do you have in your pocket right now? Do you love or hate pennies?

Penny for your thoughts? Or, more like fifty bucks?

Ever wonder why we are in such deep doo doo? Maybe decisions by our government like this will clue you in.

clipped from blogs.wsj.com As a one of four new pennies enters circulation today, it reintroduces the question of why we even need pennies in the first place. In a 2006 editorial in the Journal, Harvard economist Greg Mankiw made a simple case for getting rid of the penny. “The purpose of the monetary system is to facilitate exchange, but I have to acknowledge that the penny no longer serves that purpose. When people start leaving a monetary unit at the cash register for the next customer, the unit is too small to be useful. I know that some people will be upset when their favorite aphorisms become anachronistic, but a nickel saved is also a nickel earned,” he wrote. “Producing a penny now costs about 1.7 cents. A 2006 poll by coin-counter CoinStar, not a completely unbiased source, found that two-thirds of people think the penny should be kept as an “important symbol of American culture, history and the economy.”