What Are We Going to Do With 300 Billion Pennies? Highlight

In a practical sense, penny coins are worthless. (Many people, who do not themselves purchase anything with pennies, assume that very poor people probably use them—disregarding the fact that they have never seen a poor person settling a bill with hundreds of pennies, which would take a very long time to amass, on top of being cumbersome to carry around; the sociologists I interviewed, who study extreme poverty, expressed skepticism that anyone lives off hordes of one-cent coins.) Effectively, they are trash—trash that Americans pay the government (via taxes) to manufacture, at a loss, and then foist back on us; millions of pounds of trash for which we, every time we have ever accepted a penny coin at checkout, have tacitly agreed to provide free private stowage, in perpetuity.