“Wer den pfennig nicht ehrt, ist den taler nicht wert.”
Translation: The one not valuing the penny, is not worth the dollar.
This is an old German saying, and it could have lost some meaning in the translation.
I have been brought up to respect the meaning behind this phrase; I live by it and still pick up a penny on the road if I come across one.
So here are my thoughts on abolishing the penny.
I feel the physical penny has to stay for a number of reasons, and not just electronically as has been suggested. I dismiss the fact that the cost of producing the penny is diminishing the value of the penny itself.
The production cost is about one-and-a-half cents whereas the distribution of the penny could be as high as three cents.
There are a lot of products on the market where the face value is considerably higher than the actual value.
The penny still plays an important part in our currency structure. Certain parts of our industries love to divide the penny even in one more digit, up to nine.
Consider gasoline, where the emphasis is to get the first impression on the actual price and that cent fraction gets absorbed unnoticed by the customer, but it is a gain for the producer.
The stock market even uses a two-digit fraction to break down the penny. No wonder, as a one-cent (penny) change in the dollar currency on the world market could mean millions of dollars in trade deficit/gain.
The Senate committee appears to favour the “Swedish rounding” system, by suggesting voluntary guidelines to rounding to the nearest nickel “in cash transactions only.”
So leave the penny (cent) where it is. Our society has evolved into making plastic money transactions, where the penny is only a penny’s worth.
Our governments only talk of millions and billions, even for the smallest projects. There of course, the pennies don’t count. Pennies appear mostly on paper and certain sections of our population.
There are penny collectors and apparently there are 20 billion pennies in circulation, worth $200 million.
Maybe that’s the reason the government has to keep producing the pennies to fill the demand – so that the collectors can fill piggybanks for a rainy day.
In my opinion, no matter what the outcome for penny, the bottom line is that we as the paying public have to pay one way or the other.
Keeping the penny in circulation in the long run with proper management would be a better alternative than abolishing it.
Ten pennies still make a dime or 100 pennies amount to a dollar no matter what the cost of a penny is.
Bruno Fenger, Surrey
