to my knowledge the legislation only says that the executive branch needs to make the "necessary" amount of pennies. the argument is that because they're losing money literally printing money that the "necessary" amount is zero and that therefore doing this follows the law because zero is an amount.
A better measure, assuming that pennies facilitate value exchange[1], would be whether the cost to mint a penny exceeded the marginal increase in GDP[2] due to having that additional penny available.
[1]: This assumption may not be true; if they're worth so little that people lose track of them, they could actually make it harder to exchange value.
[2]: Making the GDP higher is also a very debatable measure, but I think this generalizes to other dollar-denominated measures of prosperity.
A penny is reused over and over again, every time it changes hands. It’s not necessarily bad that it costs a few cents to make one if it has utility.
It costs more to make a ceramic mug than it does to fill it with coffee. That doesn’t make a ceramic mug uneconomical, because it’s used lots of times and the cost amortizes.
...Having said that, I don’t think there’s actually much value to having an individual token of exchange that signifies as little value as a penny does - it would be a good idea to stop making them even if they cost far less to make than they do.
I agree with you on that - that’s what my last paragraph was trying to convey. I don’t think pennies are necessary, and we are (were) wasting money making them. Nickels and dimes are probably in the same boat.
But I was replying to your reply to a comment which said “I don’t understand why it costing more than face value to mint is such a bad thing” which you antagonistically and derisively called “one of the stupidest comments I have seen on the internet bar none”. It wasn’t a stupid comment.
