Leaving Comments and Bad Pennies

Some may have noticed that my production level of new posts has declined somewhat of late. I'm not entirely sure of the reason for that. Perhaps part of it is because I have found myself leaving long, detailed comments on other people's blogs and by the time I'm done with that, I'm all creativity'd out.

Or maybe I'm just lazy.

Anyway, one solution to the problem is just to cross-post my comments here.

A minute ago I left a comment on my brother-in-law's blog. He likes taking on unusual projects and his latest shin-dig is to collect coins that he finds and keep track of what and where. Sounds like something that would entertain me for about 20 minutes, but it has kept him busy for over two months. So in looking at his totals, he came to the realization that he almost never finds nickels. His question: why is that?

In this season of political intrigue, the answer can only be a political one, so here was my response:

Well when you elect me President, I'll do away with the Penny... seriously - why do we even have pennies anymore?

And then everything will round out to the nearest 5 cents and nickels will reclaim the glory that they have lost thanks to the inept policies of the Bush Administration.

No, really, why do we even have pennies? Think about it. The reason that you have found 64 pennies (4 times more than the next highest total number of coins) is that they are worthless. When I buy anything at the cafeteria at work, any pennies that they give back go into the give-a-penny jar because they mean nothing to me.

So what would be the downfall of the no-more-penny law? I suppose that retail establishments might try to take advantage of it by making sure items come out to a total ending in 8 so that they can round up and get two free cents. Doing the math, and assuming a super-shopper who makes 10 retail transactions with cash every day (after all, there would be no need to change the credit card transactions). If, in each of these transactions, the customer lost 2 cents that she otherwise would have retained, then our shopper is losing 20 cents every day. If our shopper is doing this every day, including Sunday, then they are losing $1.40 every week. That comes out to a total of a little over 70 dollars every year.

Or perhaps a more reasonable transaction rate of 3 transactions per day 5 days a week would come out to 30 cents per week or 15 dollars per year. As president I would sign an executive order to give a universal tax rebate to everybody for 15 dollars. This would be paid for with the savings from stopping production of pennies and from the money made by collecting all old pennies and selling them to China.

Vote Braden/Barney 2008!