what, of course, Is the plan for all money?
Many Americans – and many who are not Americans enjoy watching from a safe distance the predictable failures that occur week after week in this theoretical superpower – find themselves now pondering a question. What is the United States going to do with all the money – all the money in take-a-penny-leave-a-penny trays, and cash registers, and couch cushions, and children’s coin purses, and Big Gulp cups filled with pennies; All that money lying around somewhere – after the sudden announcement that the country is no longer in the penny game and will stop using them with immediate effect?
The answer seems to be Nothing!There is no plan,
The US Mint estimates there are 300 billion pennies in circulation – which, if true, means there are about three times more US pennies than there are stars in the Milky Way galaxy. Howyou ask, Could the plan for 300,000,000,000 coins be “nothing”? mintYou tell, Issued a formal press release about acquiring the final cents. Definitelyyou insist, Does this imply some kind of strategy, or at least evidence of logical human thought and action?
Wow – you’re talking like a little angel raised by puppies in a beach castle, with no right angle, who has never attempted to snatch useful information from a public affairs officer of any government agency. I’d do anything to spend 30 heady minutes in your gumdrop world. Let me take my round little face between my hands and squeeze it tight as I yell this:
That’s not how things work with money.
I have the misfortune to have more diverse information about U.S. one-cent coins than probably any other person on this planet. This is not arrogance. The information I provide is data that no one without a neurodevelopmental disorder would be curious to know; It is a storehouse of knowledge that has no practical use for anyone. I had this situation last year, as I spent several months trying to figure out why, in the year 2024, one out of every two coins minted in the United States would be a one-cent piece, even if virtually. No One cent of the pieces had never been spent in the nationwide operation of commerce, and, on top of that, each one cost more than Three Every cent for construction.
In search of answers, I interviewed former Mint directors, members of Congress, professors of metallurgical engineering and law, economists, charity workers, numerous makers of the machines that turn regular pennies into souvenir smush pennies, scrap-metal recyclers, historians, lobbyists, the CEO of Coinstar, coin collectors, sociologists, government auditors, and the crazy goblins who work at the Federal Reserve. The initial draft of a story I submitted to a popular New York City-based publication was 20,000 words long. (Sadly, all the best parts were cut out by my psychological editor, whose No. 1 obsession in life was to remove the 13,000 perfect words from my first draft; I don’t care about reading these words, because a low-class butcher like that doesn’t have enough humanity to subscribe.) atlantic—However, if you know William, I would thank you if you did not send him a gift link to this article.) And what I found out was that there was no good reason for it.
The simplest way to put it is that everyone directly involved in making billions of money every year knew it was futile to do so, and also thought it was legally impossible to stop. Specifically, they thought they were obligated to make money unless Congress issued a law ordering them to close (which, everyone agreed, was unlikely to ever happen). I found during my many months of research that this did not appear to be true.
I published my theory – that Title 31, Section 5111 of the United States Code of Laws gives the Secretary of the Treasury the authority to order that no money be minted – last September. On the US Mint webpage, which appears to have been created earlier this week (concurrently with the announcement that the final penny coins for circulation were launched in Philadelphia), this long-ignored section of the US Code is cited as legal justification for halting penny production.
Another thing I learned every day during my reporting: Nobody cares about money. It was almost impossible to find people to talk to me about them, even, in the case of US Mint public affairs officers, when that was clearly their job. (The Mint, which lavishes billions of unwanted and unused pennies on the nation every year, gave me the strong impression of being embarrassed to be associated with the coins in any way. In fact, a retired Mint spokesperson confirmed this.)
There were logical reasons not to care: 300 billion pennies – all of them still and indefinitely legal tender – make up almost zero percent of the total money supply of the United States (0.0 percent if rounded to one decimal place). The millions of dollars that the government loses by paying more than three cents to mint one-cent coins represent an extremely small fraction of 1 percent of the government’s multi-trillion-dollar budget. And these days, most people rarely encounter coins. According to government reports, most of the money ever minted in this country has either “disappeared” (yes, that’s the official term) or is “sitting” in the private homes of Americans.
The main problem with Pennies turned out to be mostly psychological horror. In my article, I described this position as “the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard” and a “perpetually sharp contradiction” – both terms I stand by a year later.
Most of the money produced by the US Mint is given out as change but is never spent; This creates a constant demand for new pennies to replace them, so that cash transactions that require pennies (i.e., any amount whose last digit is 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8 or 9) can be settled. Because these replacement money will not themselves be spent, they will need to be replaced by new money that will not also be spent, and so they will need to be replaced by new money that will not be spent, which will need to be replaced by new money (which will not be spent, and therefore will have to be replaced). In other words, we keep minting money because no one uses the money we mint.
but that wasn’t the problem Lonely The theoretical terror of infinity. These tokens are also a physical burden, adding 2.5 grams of weight to Americans’ cup holders and winter-coat pockets and junk drawers. Cowri coins are useless from practical point of view. (Many people, who don’t buy anything with the pennies themselves, assume that very poor people probably use them – ignoring the fact that they have never seen a poor person settle a bill with hundreds of pennies, which would take a very long time to collect, on top of that it is cumbersome to carry; sociologists I interviewed who study extreme poverty expressed skepticism that anyone lives on multitudes of one-cent coins.) Effectively. From, they are trash – trash that Americans pay for. The government creates losses (through taxes), and then imposes them back on us; Millions of pounds of garbage for which we, accepting a penny coin at checkout every time, have tacitly agreed to provide free private storage forever.
So we’ve stashed money in our empty water-cooler jugs, under the floor mats in our RAV4s. we have to. Mint officials told federal auditors in 2019 that, if even a fraction of the nation’s never-spent pennies were simultaneously spent or redeemed, the flood of change would be “logistically unbearable” for the federal government. For one thing, there probably won’t be enough room in our nation’s bank vaults to hold them.
When I read the news that the Mint had prepared its last penny for circulation, the first thing I thought was: What are they going to do about the safes? I went to the Mint website and read its press release. Then I read each item on the neatly formatted Penny FAQ page. Then I realized they weren’t going to do anything about the safes, because they had no plans to do anything except stop making money.
When a smoothly run country chooses to retire part of its currency it doesn’t usually work out like this. Canada, surprisingly, provides a perfect model: when the cost of manufacturing Canadian pennies reached 1.6 cents in 2012, the government announced it would stop producing the coins and gradually withdraw them from circulation. Simultaneously, the government launched a strong public-information campaign, explaining to Canadians the reasoning behind its decision and publishing guidance (including small photographs) on how to complete cash transactions in the absence of money. To date, the Canadian Mint has recycled over 15,000 tonnes of pennies, which have been redeemed by the public at their face value. Recycling the metal from Canadian pennies (primarily copper and steel) helped reduce the cost of trucking billions of unwanted pennies across the country. And, of course, it kept coins out of landfills.
But it’s not clear whether anyone will bother recycling American pennies, which are made mostly of zinc despite being plated with copper. The value of recycled zinc is only about a quarter of that of recycled copper; About 1 million tons of copper is recycled in the US each year, compared to only 165,000 tons of zinc. Furthermore, a Canadian Mint official told me, it is “very difficult” to separate copper and zinc.
The good news, which is also very bad news, is that smelting zinc—extracting it from rock—is what a professor at the Colorado School of Mines described to me as “a very unclean, toxic process.” The best case scenario for recycling American pennies would probably be if industrial manufacturers were willing to pay for old penny material in exchange for avoiding the trouble, expense, and danger of harvesting fresh zinc. The worst case scenario seems to be that we have just days ago stopped manufacturing billions and trillions of dangerously produced zinc discs with no practical use, which are not even salable as scrap.
Incredibly, Penny’s ending appears to be even more insulting than this phrase. worst case scenario Can give suggestions. A landscape is a sketch of a possible future event; worst case Implies some sense of order and codification – that multiple scenarios have been considered, and ranked by degree of badness. worst case scenario It implies that one is thinking beyond the present moment, about what can and should be done; It implies an intention, or at least a desire, to avoid a worst-case scenario.
It appears that that option, like all the others, has been taken off the table. In fact, the tabletop is completely empty. The government has not issued any guidance on how cash transactions calculated in cents should work in the cent-less country (which will happen with shocking speed as soon as the last batch of pennies is taken out of circulation). “We are not aware of any plans to issue rounding guidance,” Andrew Von Ahn, director of physical infrastructure for the Government Accountability Office, told me on Friday. In 2019, GAO issued a report in which an association representing the nation’s banks specifically stressed the need for public education and guidance “before suspending money.” The GAO, von Ahn said, is likewise “not aware of any plans to remove the penny from circulation” – nor indeed “of any plans to mitigate any potential issues with penny suspension.”
So: no one is coming to collect all the useless money. And no one is explaining how to survive without them. In other words, the government is treating pennies the same way it has for decades: by making them Americans’ problem.
But perhaps the most worrying thing that von Ahn told me wasn’t about the lack of planning for Penny’s sudden death. It was about the possibility that a meaningless percentage of us might someday rise from the dead. “The Mint may decide to resume production of pennies in the future — or was it a warning? — if it is determined it needs to do so,” von Ahn said.