Pennies: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

the penny once again on the cover of this month's infant swallow Vols magazine the US Mint produces around 8 billion new pennies every single year which is strange considering pennies are currently worth so little they're not even worth what they're worth according to the government each new penny now costs roughly 1.7 cents to make rendering each a loss from the start it's true 1.7 cents to make one cent that really makes the phrase you have to spend money to make money ring painfully true so so we spend around 136 million dollars a year making 80 million dollars worth of currency that let's face it no one really uses one study found that two-thirds of pennies don't circulate and yet the penny hangs around for no reason like the appendix or the new Muppet TV show how is this still on and how did someone somewhere think you know what the problem with them up it is Kermit doesn't enough pigs let's have a different pig let's do that let's let's all do that in fact a few years back a local station in New York sent out a camera crew to put the penny to the test I performed a little experiment down the street today dumped 150 pennies onto the sidewalk and just watched who would pick them up people saw the pennies like this woman but kept walking after 25 minutes not one person bent down think about that a penny is actual US currency and yet the prospect of a free one on the ground is treated like a free copy of Kirstie Alley's memoir resting in a used diaper and if you thinking well come on John that's just one instance no it's not a few years later a San Francisco news crew ran the exact same experiment it's your lucky day Abe Lincoln face up on the sidewalk better move quick he'll be gone any second right you don't want them no strolling pennies on the ground is essentially catnip to local news crews hey did an old woman celebrate a birthday no ok did an animal do something funny no ok get me a handful of pennies and a camera I'm getting us to the 10:30 repeater friends who wants a penny but our indifference to pennies doesn't stop there in a 2002 Gallup poll two percent of Americans admitted to regularly throwing pennies in the garbage which means the US Mint is spending millions to make garbage and that's not their job that's M night Shyamalan job and what I love and when we're not throwing pennies in the garbage we're doing even worse things with them as attested to by a reddit thread titled I put a penny in my butt and now I can't get it out and before you ask apparently the reason they did it was and I quote I wanted to know what it would feel like to put a cold penny up my butt I put it in the fridge for like two to three hours first a little known fact that's actually how Daniel day-lewis prepared to buy Abraham Lincoln and incidentally and this is also true that penny is currently in your pocket and it's not just hard to carry pennies around it can be hard to spend them according to the Treasury Department private businesses are free to prohibit payment in pennies and some of them have caught on to this at a growing number of businesses including Mike's Bikes in San Rafael pennies have fallen from favor now it Mike's every cash transaction rounds down to the nearest nickel pin a customer's favor their reaction has been overwhelmingly under whelming whatever is easier I don't care oh I'm pretty sure we just found the man who gives the least amount of shits in American history someone out there needs to mean with this beautiful man and do it now in fact in fact as far as I can tell there are only two things pennies are genuinely good for one you can throw a penny in a fountain to make a wish but at its current value no fountain is granting your wish unless it's incredibly small like I wish somewhere in the world a mouse has a good day or I wish I knew what a penny looked like under water the only other option is use pennies out of pure spite like this unc charlotte student did with a parking fine coil went to three different banks to get five twenty five dollar boxes containing 2,500 pennies that got him to reach his total of eleven thousand and i brought him in three separate buckets for them he sat there while two workers counted every single penny i took them approximately three hundred and forty minutes Wow that college kid sure taught those two employees who had nothing to do with the policy he was protesting a lesson I bet the school gave him his own parking spot after that and it is worth noting pennies don't just waste our time having them hanging around can sometimes be downright dangerous jack is a voracious eater says his owner Tim Kelleher this is how it happens he jumped up on the desk trying to get something man and he chewed through the bag and he knocked the box over and pennies were everywhere and he licked up the pennies and he lifts up 111 of them oh a hundred and eleven pennies at that point that dog had more Lincoln in him than Mary Todd and by the way and this is also true one of the pennies inside that dog is in your pocket right now so why haven't we gotten rid of the penny well one reason believe it or not is that there is a penny lobby and at the forefront is a terribly named group called Americans for common sense who spokesman has some pretty unconvincing arguments Americans overwhelmingly want to keep the penny and no one has explained how we would replace the millions of dollars that are raised by charities and charity drives every year if we didn't have the penny around wait so his argument is no one would give to charity if they couldn't give something basically worthless which is a pretty cynical view of humanity I'll be honest I don't think much of people but even I have to believe they'd be willing to break out a nickel and you might want to take his argument with a grain of salt given his group's backers Willers a lobbyist for Jordan Z the Tennessee company that sells those little blank discs for the mid to turn into Lincoln pennies so they're in the pocket of big zinc and if not for the penny what are they supposed to do with all those blank zinc disks hold a mini Olympic discus throwing competition starring hamsters from around the globe yes that's clearly exactly what they should do but even that zinc company doesn't seem to care that much about pennies so far this year they've only spent around one hundred and forty thousand dollars lobbying on it which isn't much considering that jardín corporation their parent company is a 10 billion dollar business the penny contract is nothing to them next to the money that they make from products like and this is true Yankee Candle crockpots and class rings essentially jars and makes anything that you would find left behind after a burglary but but there is there's actually one more staunch defender of the penny Lincoln enthusiasts the Lincoln library told us they'll fight for the Lincoln penny right down to the last cent yep but why Lincoln doesn't need the penny for notoriety he's everywhere we've put him on novelty bandages cup and ball games and creepy cheer pets and you know what else we put in the $5 bill you know the thing that's worth 500 times more than the penny and if you think you will maybe we could make the penny out of something cheaper we can't the US Mint admitted that there are no alternative metal compositions that reduce the manufacturing cost of the penny below its face value essentially there is no cheaper way to make a penny because there is no other substance that is so worthless without making them out of DVDs of The Cosby Show and we don't want it we don't want to do that you don't want to do that and if we wanted to get rid of the penny we could do it Canada Australia Ireland New Zealand and many others have all done so in recent years it wouldn't even be the first time the u.s. got rid of a coin we used to have a half penny and guess when we got rid of it the half penny was dropped in 1857 because inflation had rendered its buying power absolute they knew it didn't make sense to keep a currency that had no value and that was back in 1857 when people were scared of the moon and wipe their asses with rocks so come on let's dump the penny not because we need to not because it will change a great deal but because there are certain things we know are impossible to get rid of terrorism herpes and Guy Fieri but but the penny is a nuisance we could actually do something about so let's do it America let's get the penny out of our pockets out of our dogs out of our fridges and out of our asses we can do this you

Channel: LastWeekTonight

Views: 9,389,833

Rating: 4.8992033 out of 5

Keywords: Last Week Tonight With John Oliver (TV Program), John Oliver (TV Writer), pennies, HBO (TV Network)

Id: _tyszHg96KI

Length: 9min 36sec (576 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 22 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

The anti-penny lobby grows: CGPGrey, John Green and now John Oliver.

[u/at_work_alt]

The only use of pennies is to avoid receiving pennies with your change.

[u/mattjawad]

This is the last episode of the season. Season 3 starts February 14.

[u/canausernamebetoolon]

It was nice to have a break from soul-crushing facts about the US justice system this week.

[u/Bas7ard]

ass pennies

[u/stephenrane]

I really like the new Muppets show :\

[u/TheDataAngel]

Mirror?

[u/HayesNSean]

But if they get rid of pennies what lucky coin will I pick up off of sidewalks? They get rid of pennies, people find less pennies, therefore less lucky pennies, therefore less luck, therefore our collective lack of luck causes us to get hit by a meteor.

[u/azGRIMES]

Canada got rid of pennies over two years ago. The US could easily do the same.