Good morning. Today, my colleague Caity Weaver explains an intractable problem inside America's change purses. We're also covering hostages, psychiatric hospitals and a literary quiz. —David Leonhardt
Pound-foolish
I have good news and I have bad news. Actually, I have crazy news and I have bad news. Actually, all the news I have is bad, but some of it is also crazy. Before you become totally freaked out, all the news I'm describing here is about pennies; it's nothing life and death. But you do need to buckle up. If you are reading this and live in America, or used to live in America, or maybe just went to America one time many years ago, then you are almost certainly performing unpaid labor for the U.S. government and have been for years. How? By storing some of the billions of pennies the U.S. Mint makes every year that virtually no one uses. Why are we still making tons (many thousands of tons) of pennies if no one uses them? That's a sensible question with a psychotic answer: We have to keep making all these pennies — over $45 million worth last year — because no one uses them. In fact, it could be very bad if we did. When you insert a quarter into a soda machine, that quarter eventually finds its way back to a bank, from which it can be redistributed to a store's cash register and handed out as change — maybe even to you, who can put it into a soda machine again and start the whole process over. That's beautiful. (Please be mindful of your soft drink consumption.) But few of us ever spend pennies. We mostly just store them. The 1-cent coins are wherever you've left them: a glass jar, a winter purse, a RAV4 cup holder, a five-gallon water cooler dispenser, the couch. Many of them are simply on the ground. But take it from me, a former cashier: Cashiers don't have time to scrounge on the sidewalk every time they need to make change. That is where the Mint comes in. Every year it makes a few billion more pennies to replace the ones everyone is thoughtlessly, indefinitely storing and scatters them like kudzu seeds across the nation. You — a scientist of some kind, possibly — might think an obvious solution now presents itself: Why not encourage people to use the pennies they have lying around instead of manufacturing new ones every year? We can't! Or, anyway, we'd better not. According to a Mint report, if even a modest share of our neglected pennies suddenly returned to circulation, the result would be a "logistically unmanageable" dilemma for Earth's wealthiest nation. As in, the penny tsunami could overwhelm government vaults. That's not great, but at the end of the day we're talking only about pennies. How much could a penny cost to make? A penny? If only we lived in such a paradise. Unfortunately, one penny costs more than three pennies (3.07 cents at last count) to make and distribute! When I learned this, I lost my mind. Whose fault is this? And who can make it stop? I spent months pleading for answers from government officials, former Mint employees, numismatists, economists, scientists, scrap-metal industrialists, souvenir-elongated-penny machinists, historians, businesspeople, poverty researchers and even Canadians. Everyone said the same thing: Only Congress can retire the American 1-cent coin. Wait, actually, there is (maybe) good news: Everyone might be wrong. While writing an article about all of this for The Times Magazine, I'm pretty sure I found a loophole buried deep in the forgotten annals of the U.S. legal code that could end this pointless penny plague. I think there is one person in the United States who can unilaterally kill the penny this afternoon if he or she wants to. It's not the president of the United States or the director of the Mint or the head of Coinstar, the private coin-recycling company that has become a crucial cog in the U.S. monetary system (though I had a lovely long talk with him). In fact, it's probably not anyone you would think of. Find out who in the magazine story. And if you are a penny lover, there is happy news for you, too. Since it first began issuing 1-cent coins in 1793, the United States has produced about half a trillion of them — far more than the number of stars in the Milky Way. Even if we get rid of the penny, there will be plenty to go around forever.
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