Let's save the dollars we spend minting worthless pennies

Cartoonists and comedians have a way of making a point that serious commentators can't.

Take the Charlie Hebdo cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad for example, with repercussions continuing today.

Or Hannibal Buress, who outed Bill Cosby for sexual assaults Cosby allegedly had covered up for decades.

On a lighter note, John Oliver, who delights in pointing out absurdities on his HBO show, Last Week Tonight, recently took on the lowly penny.

How low is it?

A couple of television crews decided to do an experiment, throwing 150 pennies on a busy street. You can guess what happened. By the time they stopped filming passers-by, all the pennies were still on the sidewalk.

Not only do most of us not bother to pick them up, many of us throw them away as annoying trash.

We have to admit, since the post office took out the stamp machine, we're at a loss as to what to do with our 1-cent coins.

Throw them in the Ronald McDonald House basket at McDonalds' drive through?

That's a good idea, and one of the most popular arguments for keeping them in circulation is that they are used in charitable contributions.

That wasn't proven when New Zealand and Australia eliminated the penny; charitable contributions held strong.

Penny proponents say eliminating the coin would disrespect Abraham Lincoln, but they ignore the fact his face remains on the $5 bill.

They also say retailers would take advantage by rounding up prices 5 cents, but inflation in New Zealand and Australia negated any such effects in a short amount of time.

Speaking of retail, what can you buy with a penny? Most people who pay bills with pennies are doing it as some sort of a protest.

There might be some merit in the argument that sales taxes, 7 cents total in McCook, for example, might be too easy to round up to, say, 10 cents. A 3-cent jump might be a hard-sell to the taxpayers, however.

But anyone taking a hard-nosed look at the penny would have a hard time justifying keeping it in production.

Two thirds of them, for example, are not even in circulation.

It costs nearly 2 cents to produce a 1-cent coin, and we're spending $136 million to make $80 million worth of zinc-copper currency, and mints spend as much time making pennies as they do all other coins combined.

We waste nearly two and a half hours per year handling pennies or waiting for someone else to do so, did you think of that while you were waiting in the Black Friday checkout line?

They're also heavy and wasteful to transport.

The main argument for keeping the penny in circulation is nostalgia.

We once had half-pennies, but stopped producing them when they no longer made sense.

That time arrived long ago for the lowly penny.

It's time to leave the numismatic past behind.