I was rolling up my extra change to go out and buy some gas. After spending some time and a lot of coin rolls I started to think about how wasteful a penny is. Now everybody know or heard this "A Penny Saved is a Penny Earned," But if Benjamin Franklin was around today and had to carry 15 dollars of pennies to buy lawnmower gas then he may have second thoughts about nickels.

    There are about 150 billion US pennies in circulation today. "Did you know that a pound of pennies is $1.64?" The price of copper had risen to $1.33 per pound in 1980, so pennies could not be minted for less than their monetary value.  Copper-plated coins postponed the crisis (in 2000, it cost 0.0081¢ to mint a penny). Yet according to the mint annual report this has gone up 0.0093 in 2004. This is down from the 0.0098 of 2003. Yet with Copper, the metal has averaged $3,430.60 a ton so far in 2005, up 24 percent from a year earlier.    

     Overall average mileage with city/highway is 12-13 mpg with a combined weight of over 6,000 pounds for armor vehicles. Are pennies weights worth the cost that can cause the wear and tear on the engine, suspension and tires? How much saving in fuel mileage would there be? Do you think that we would fear an increase of gas by a nickel instead of pennies? This would get rid of the imperceptible .1 of a gallon on the end of gas price. How many times have you seen another fraction other than .9? Have you ever gone up to a gas pump and seen 199.5 a gallon?  

     Are they making Penny candy anymore? If they are then candy will be five for a nickel. The Kids will love that idea. We can have nickels sales no more pennies sale. How much saving would there be in back injury from picking up all these pennies. Some people will drop them and leave them for other to suffer for. The trouble is everything would have to be a nickel. Yet on the average the figure would work out to the better. Less cost of producing, less weight, less figuring and most of all gas would go down a nickel. So let’s save gas, jobs and get rid of the penny.

A nickel for your thought

JDProud