Convert the penny!!!

This is actually the response I expected. I am familiar with Robert Whaples' point of view, and I even read his article entitled "Why keeping the penny no longer makes sense." But despite the viewpoints of Robert Whaples, Greg Mankiw, and a few others, the economy truly would suffer due to the elimination of the penny. In Whaples' article, he claims to have obtained data on "nearly 200,000 transactions" and states "the number of times consumers' bills would be rounded upward is almost exactly equal to the number of times that they would be rounded downward." These words of "nearly" and "almost" accompanied by a complete lack of data make his view flaky at best. In reality, the rounding tax is not a myth. On the surface Whaples' claim may seem to hold water. But upon a deeper analysis we can find out why it is untrue. Currently we still have the penny, but even now due to the sales tax percentages, costs are being rounded up or down to the penny. Here's the problem: whenever a customer purchases an item that would end in a half a penny after tax, that item gets rounded up to the penny. One half lies exactly between being rounded up or down. Yet it gets rounded up every time. This may seem trivial, but such trivial percentages have allowed businesses like casinos to rake in a large portion of money. The mention of casinos may seem out of place, but the same principle with rounding pennies in convenience stores applies. The house (or the store in this case) has a small advantage since there are slightly more totals that will be rounded up rather than down. This effect insures that the stores come out on top. The effect is cumulative, just as most of the economists have claimed. Furthermore, when looking at the sales tax percentages we can see that this number of one half comes out even more often than expected from a random set of numbers. The tax percentages tend to end in eighths, quarters, or halves. This gives an even larger advantage, and studies done with common cash purchases has shown that somewhere between 60% and 93% of transactions would be rounded up. While the rounding tax and the devastation of the economy should be enough to dissuade others from eliminating the penny, it is not the only reason to save the penny. The people that have proposed this notion claim that prices would still be the same when it comes to payments by check, credit card, or debit card. Only cash paying customers would apparently suffer since there would be no more pennies. This means that the one cent unit of currency would still exist on paper. There would just be no tangible one cent pieces. Our current system uses the same units of currency on paper or in the form of tangible cash. So eliminating the penny would move one step closer to eliminating tangible currency. This may seem like nothing, but it can open up a huge can of worms. Once people become used to the idea of currency that only exists electronically, further steps in the same direction can be made. When every purchase by every person is made electronically, the items that each individual buys will be able to be tracked. This is not a good thing. The current president has already violated privacy rights by viewing all of the books that people read and check out of a library. Further rights can be violated when the government can track every purchase by every person. I saw that you are in favor of George W. Bush, but you should still acknowledge that privacy would be violated if every individual's transactions can be traced. Since you stated that you are also in favor of flag burning, I think you may understand the philosophical necessity of freedom and rights. On your profile it also states that you are against a flat tax. I am as well, because it would damage the lower class. Similarly, the rounding tax (which is NOT a myth, despite Robert Whaples' claim) would also adversely affect the lower class since they are the ones more likely to make purchases with cash rather than credit cards or checks. So the two reasons to save the penny are that the economy would suffer overall, and the movement towards an elimination of tangible currency is a step in the wrong direction.