The Terrifying Reason Why Pennies Still Exist

find a penny pick it up all day long you'll have good luck unless of course pennies are actually the source of our country's debt not very lucky those cute little tinkling copper colored coins are actually hurting our economy just by making them no how does making money lose us money you might ask I'll tell you because the penny although the penny was the first currency of any type author's by the United States you have to keep in mind that the penny was five times heavier than today's adorable little penny but since then more than three hundred billion one cent coins have been minted since 1787 and they just keep getting thinner and smaller and most importantly of less value penny what's with that didn't need to lose weight be proud of that you know metal little body you look great the first penny was made of 100% copper pretty valuable and pretty nice now pennies are made of 97.5% zinc and 2.5% copper zinc was much cheaper than copper but now zinc is becoming even more rare and thus more expensive to get probably because we made so many damn pennies so now we're running out not necessarily making the penny more valuable just making it more expensive to make so now eight billion pennies only adds up to eight million dollars why would our money not add up to what our money should add up to because the penny is pointless and almost worthless the average American wage was twenty two dollars an hour in 2012 so it's literally pointless for a majority of Americans to pick up a penny because their time is more valuable than the act of picking up that penny it's probably more beneficial to just find yourself burping because you could actually make more money doing that you know if it goes viral ah come on Internet take my burp and vine and then when you add the cost of labor that it takes to make pennies it now costs 2.5 cents per penny we made in 2014 the US taxpayer lost 105 million dollars in pennies and nickels yeah because nickels are kind of dicks to screw you to nickel and here's the creepy thing politicians know it's a waste Obama literally said any time we're spending more money on something that people don't actually use that's an example of something we should probably change but we still have them that would be like if we kept floppy disks there's no point but jardín corporations who is the exclusive zinc provider for our pennies tends to back a lot of certain pro penny lobbyists and Congress got a lot of big business the main argument Pro penny lobbyists make against discarding the penny is the rounding tax argument which states that retailers in the world without pennies would affect the poor and young who are more likely to spend the money using pennies so maybe you're saying yeah don't affect the poor and young but maybe we could be giving them more than pennies if we stopped wasting money making pennies just a thought besides a study in 2006 that looked at the hundreds of thousands of transactions found that after all other taxes and fees were added rounding prices to the nearest nickel actually benefited customers Chipotle began rounding up to the nearest nickel to speed up their lines and then realize customers were not going to deal with that and that it wasn't beneficial fiscally so now they've rounded down so we pay pennies less for our burrito Chipotle gets it we have the power in our money spending hands and our burrito-eating mouths hmm tastes like victory and a tortilla but if that study isn't enough we can just check out our neighbor Canada who phased out the penny in 2013 not impressed by Canada successfully saving money by cutting the penny well you can always check out Britain France Israel New Zealand Norway and sweet we've all gotten rid of their smallest units of currency we even got rid of making the $1 coin which is saving taxpayers 50 million dollars a year so not only did we sort of do it but everyone else is doing it this might be a time to succumb to peer pressure if it means that we can save one hundred and five million dollars that we can put towards school or rebuilding crumbling buildings or helping reduce our carbon footprint housing the homeless instead of tossing them pennies on the streets we don't need pennies that bad clearly other countries are doing fine without let us know what you think the US could do with that extra money by losing the penny and tweet hashtag screw the penny'll it's extravagant burrito party thanks for watching please subscribe to cracked coms videos or if you want to comment and recommend some you know different types of burritos that we could use at the extravagant burrito party that we're going to do because we've decided that's what we're going to do with 105 million dollars right

Channel: Cracked

Views: 2,366,317

Rating: 4.3349438 out of 5

Keywords: Penny (Currency), money, cash, currency, penny, cracked, zinc, Coin Collecting (Collection Activity), copper, cracked.com, sketch, comedy, funny, spoof, humor, Parody, Sketch Comedy (TV Genre), Satire (TV Genre), Market, Stock, Analysis, cent, dollar

Id: Jp4x-XpfTQ0

Length: 4min 52sec (292 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 11 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/LoveForgivenesss]

$105 million dollars per year is spent making pointless pennies! Wake the fuck up Americans! We’re like the short bus of the universe. Argh!!!!