The Top 3 Reasons Why America Should NOT Get Rid Of The Penny

Also,
Daniel Day-Lewis will be pissed.

There’s a growing segment of the population out there that thinks the U.S. government should eliminate the one cent piece aka “penny”. They say it’s worthless and wastes people’s time at cash registers all over the country. What these folks don’t realize is that there are still a lot of uses for pennies that people don’t take into consideration. Here are three of the top reasons pennies should stay in circulation:

3. Without pennies what will people throw off the Empire State Building?

It’s a popular thing to throw pennies off the Empire State Building because the myth is that it will kill someone walking down below. This myth has been proven false, but that’s with pennies. If all the pennies are gone people will start throwing nickels off tall buildings. Nickels are exactly twice as heavy as pennies so that’s double the killing power in the same coin. God forbid people start tossing Sacagawea coins off roofs then you’re going to see some real damage.

2. Without pennies what will people suck on to beat breathalyzer tests?

There’s a myth that sucking on a copper penny will fool a breathalyzer test because the metal confuses a mechanism in the blood alcohol reader. This myth was proven false, but was proven that sucking on a single penny doesn’t help. This is because modern pennies are made with a fraction of actual copper. If you have an entire mouthful of pennies it may be possible to get the desired effect. Of course you risk choking to death on spare change and the officer will most likely be suspicious of a man with his cheeks packed full of pennies, and you’ll probably catch some kind of weird disease from all those coins in your mouth, but hey you never know! Without pennies what will people suck on to beat breathalyzer tests? It won’t be coins, that’s for damn sure!

1. Pennies are basically free money for the homeless and super poor.

Pennies might not be worth much to you, Richie Rich, but some people actually depend on them to live. If a homeless person is so inclined they can go around all day long and claim pennies off the floors from all sorts of stores where people discard them like garbage. You collect a hundred of those bastards and you’ve got a whole dollar which can then be used for a lottery ticket and the chance to parlay that into millions. Pennies are useful to the super poor because regular folks just toss them out, for many that’s their only real form of charity. Meanwhile how many spare nickels do you see on the floors of America? If pennies are gone will people start tossing out nickels and dimes? I doubt it. All that free money will be gone and that’s not good for anyone.

For someone who doesn’t chuck handfuls of change off of skyscrapers, get into shitfaced high speed chases with the police, and give spare change to the homeless, the penny might seem like an obsolete outdated denomination of currency. Unfortunately the real world still needs pennies for various reasons and it may be harder than you think to get rid of them. Here’s an easy solution. If you don’t want your pennies just leave them at the cash register. Then stores can put those pennies into a big bucket and give them to the needy. Why isn’t that in every place with a cash register? What is wrong with people?