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Saturday January 3, 2009
Predictions For 2009

Thursday December 25, 2008
Accuracy of the 2008 Predictions

Tuesday November 25, 2008
What Your Basketball Sportscaster
Doesn't Want You To Know

Sunday August 10, 2008

Driver's License for Illegal Aliens?

You Bet, It's a Safety Issue.

Thursday May 8, 2008
The Illegal Alien Problem: The Fair Solution

Thursday April 3, 2008
Hillary Clinton To Divorce Bill

Thursday January 24, 2008
Dee's Laws of Life

Tuesday January 8, 2008
Predictions For 2008

Wednesday, December 26, 2007
Ban The Peny and the Nickel Too

Copyright 2007, 2008 and 2009 by C. D. Gragg, All rights reserved.

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Wednesday, December 26, 2007

Ban the Penny...and the Nickel too

Ban The Penny And The Nickel Too

Have we gone utterly mad? Is anyone paying attention? We are still using the same Lincoln Head penny that was first issued in 1909. We carry it around in our coin purses, pockets, and change makers, and have it clogging up our cash registers as if it had some value. It doesn’t.

Of course it formerly had some value in the good old days. Time was when you could buy a penny post card with it. Then you could write mama from Nashville to tell her how great your singing career was going. Or if you preferred to not let everyone know how your career was going, you could use three pennies and buy a 3-cent stamp and send a letter.

Those days are gone forever. They are not coming back. Today if you want to buy a 3-cent stamp it will cost you 33 cents. Yes, 11 times as much as when the penny had some value. And that’s not bad, our postal workers have to have a living wage too. What is bad is our unyielding grip on the past.

This sentimental anarchism of days long gone is not free. There were more than 11 billion pennies produced just last year. That's up more than a billion from 1998. These useless little coppers cost millions of dollars to produce. They are heavy and they take up space every where: in cash registers, coin purses, my pocket, and your dresser top, which was already cluttered enough.

Do we need them for anything? Absolutely not. Without them we would do the same thing we now do for half cents. We would round up or down. Instead of rounding up from $49.13 & 1/2; cents to $49.14 cents we would round down to $49.10 cents. Or we would round $49.16 & 1/2; up to $49.20 instead of $49.17. Would this cause any concern? Are you kidding; we wouldn't even notice it except for a loss of clutter in our lives.

But let's go further. Everything we have just agreed upon for the penny goes double for the nickel. When is the last time you got a nickel ice cream cone for a nickel? My last one cost $1.05. That's 21 nickels.

This large, awkward coin takes up even more space than the penny. At first it might seem to have a worth five times that of the penny. This is simply an illusion. Remember your ninth grade algebra. A penny is worth nothing and five times nothing is still nothing.

But it is not nothing to spend hundreds of millions of dollars every year producing and distributing them. That large sucking sound is your tax dollars going down a very large rat hole. We don't need more government waste. We already have more government waste than we will really ever need. It is past time to bring this sentimental, expensive, extravagance to a halt. Ban the penny and the nickel too.

So what do you think?

Copyright 2007 and 2008 by C. D. Gragg, All rights reserved

8:46 pm mst

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