The United States government is no stranger to obscene waste, but this is one of my favorite examples because of just how preventable it truly is.
Last year, the US Mint lost an ASS TON of money producing 8.4 billion pennies, due in large part to the rising cost of zinc. It now costs 1.5 cents to make a penny, resulting in the biggest loss reported for the production of the penny in nine years (not to be outdone, the nickel now costs seven cents to make).
I’d want to say that this is renewing calls for the penny to be abolished, but there doesn’t appear to be any movement on the matter because we definitely seem to be embroiled in… bigger issues. The other reason pennies continue to survive like the cockroaches of the coin world is that the argument for keeping the penny seems to be that the losses are made up on the production of dimes and quarters. That’s all well and good, except for the fact that we’re still losing this money producing a coin whose final resting place will inevitably be the bottom of a car’s center console, trapped for all eternity under a pile of receipts.
So just how much did the Mint lose making these essentially worthless coins?
$69 million.
Nice.
