The use of pennies in the US pricing system should be eliminated.

Today, pennies have become little more than a nuisance to our economy and therefore should be eliminated. In the Harris Poll, an online, nationwide poll that surveyed 2,136 adults, a total of 59% of those adults were opposed to the abolishing of the penny. The first of two main reasons people believed that the penny should remain in circulation was that the pennies served as a historical memorial to a particularly beloved president, Abraham Lincoln. In 21 December 2005, President Bush signed into law legislation directing the Secretary of the Treasury to issue newly designed reverse side images to mark the 200th anniversary of Lincoln's birth. As Mark Bishop, the executive director of the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission, praised, many people believe that "the penny is perhaps the most visible and tangible reminder of Lincoln's significance in American History." The second reason was, as claimed by Mark W. Weller, the Executive director of Americans for Common Cents, "the fact that the penny remains popular with the public and important to our pricing system." He also claimed that the statement that the "'U.S. is among the last industrialized nations to abolish' its low denomination coin runs counter to the facts. The European Union's adoption of the euro included a one-cent euro coin or 'euro penny. [...] And in the major industrialized countries, including Great Britain, Canada, Japan, and the U.S., the penny or penny-equivalent remains in production and shares similar percentages of total coins produced into those countries. However, they are wrong. The benefits of keeping pennies are overwhelmed by the consequences of keeping them. The claim that the penny is an important memorial to President Lincoln is clearly fallacious. The 16th president of the United States who maintained the Union and thereby abolished slavery by winning the Civil War, a war that made the ratification of the 13th Amendment immediately available, is memorialized enough as it is. He is already apparent on the five dollar bill (who would want to be remembered on a coin that according to William Saffire of the New York Times, "two thirds of the time immediately drop out of circulation behind sofas, drawers, etc when he or she is already on a five dollar bill; how many of those have you seen lying on the ground). Also, he has an entire memorial of him in Washington. A 99 foot marble statue of him that cost $3 million to make. Why should we in our poor economic situation today print these pennies that obviously are trivial to the accolade of Lincoln when according to MIT graduate Jeff Gore in Ric Kahn's article "Penny Pinchers" for The Globe, "the presence of pennies wastes (3 transactions/day) x (2.25 seconds/transaction) x (3 people per transaction) = 20 seconds per day. [...] it translates to 40 x 365 / 3600 - 4 hours per person per year. [...] each person is losing $60 per year, at a cost to the nation of over $15 billion per year." not to mention that the cost to making a penny costs approximately 1.6 cents? Moving on, the claim by Mark Weller, however, is not credible. In his unpublished letter to William Saffire to argue that the coin was valuable, he, as previously stated, believed the pennies to be "important to our pricing system." Not only does the reader have to question his claim as he provides no factual evidence to support his claim but the reader has to realize that this man is speaking on bias. He is the Executive director of an organization that supports the coin. He is wealth is corner stoned on the fact that the penny exists. There is no escaping economic history: it takes nearly a dime to buy what a penny bought back in 1950. Pennies are losing value and face. The United States has no use for them. As William Saffire comically remarked, " the Brits and the French - even the French! - who dumped their low-denomination coins 30 years ago, will be laughing at our senseless jingle" The penny, hardly anything more than a inconsequential memorial to such a great president, should be eliminated. They are acting as a retardant to our American economy. On the flip side, "Edmond Knowles figures he has saved an average of about 90 pennies a day for the last 38 years [...] that would be 1,308,459 pennies, or $13,084.59." (William Saffire) *shakes head*