"Abolish the penny? Plus, hostages, psychiatric hospitals, and a literary quiz."

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Russ Roberts (http://trendsingeopolitics.blogspot.com).

September 1, 2024

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

Jamie Chung for The New York Times

Pound-foolish

By Caity Weaver

I write for The New York Times Magazine.

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.

THE LATEST NEWS

Israel-Hamas War

The Hostages Families Forum, via Associated Press

Israel said that the bodies of six hostages were found in a tunnel in Gaza and blamed Hamas for their deaths.
Some in Israel criticized the government for not securing a deal to release the hostages. Five of those captured had been at a dance music festival in southern Israel, including Hersh Goldberg-Polin, an Israeli American citizen.
Health workers in Gaza began a polio vaccination drive after Hamas and Israel agreed to pauses in the fighting to allow vaccinations to take place.
“He couldn’t understand the danger”: A family in the occupied West Bank mourned the death of a relative with mental illness they said had been killed during an Israeli raid this past week.

War in Ukraine

Russia long avoided sending young conscripts to the front lines. Ukraine’s incursion into Russia’s Kursk region upended that practice.
Residents of the eastern Ukrainian town of Pokrovsk are evacuating daily. Kyiv hoped that its incursion would draw Russian forces away, but they are closing in.

More International News

A woman holds a child on her lap while surrounded by other children.

In Maracaibo, Venezuela. Marian Carrasquero for The New York Times

Around a quarter of the residents of Maracaibo — Venezuela’s second-largest city — have moved, some driven to the U.S. and elsewhere in South America by political and economic instability.
The rape and murder of a junior doctor in Kolkata has highlighted subpar security and grueling working conditions at India’s hospitals.
The mayor of Paris said the Olympic rings that were installed on the Eiffel Tower for the Games would become a permanent part of the monument.

2024 Election

The Trump campaign, through interviews with YouTubers and internet streamers, is courting young men who have been regarded as unreachable.
The election has soured old friendships in Silicon Valley, as some tech leaders become vocal about their support for Donald Trump, The Wall Street Journal reports.
The campaigns of Kamala Harris and Trump, when combined with their super PACs, have raised $1.3 billion. See a list of their biggest donors.

THE SUNDAY DEBATE

Did Harris’s first major TV interview as a presidential nominee help her campaign?

Yes. Harris’s interview was not flashy, but it demonstrated her levelheadedness. “A White House run by a pragmatic lawyer … is fairly dull; a good thing, at least for those of us who prefer our president to be working instead of hamming it up for the cameras,” Jill Filipovic writes for The Daily Beast.

No. Harris did not tell voters where she stood on important topics. “If Harris’s campaign is about values, but she is unwilling to more forcefully champion women’s rights and the value of Palestinian lives, she risks making some wonder just what those values are,” The Guardian’s Moira Donegan writes.

FROM OPINION

President Biden needs to take steps toward outlawing the death penalty, even if he fails in the short term, the editorial board writes.

We should learn to live without air-conditioning, both to slow climate change and to adapt to it, Stan Cox argues.

Here is a column by Nicholas Kristof on working-class voters.

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THE WEEK AHEAD

What to Watch For

Tomorrow is Labor Day.
Jury selection for Hunter Biden’s tax trial is set to begin on Thursday.
The Toronto International Film Festival begins on Thursday.
The U.S. jobs report for August is released on Friday.
The U.S. Open women’s singles final is on Saturday.

Meal Plan

Shrimp with olive oil and lemon is in a large serving bowl and served onto smaller white plates with crusty bread and glasses of rosé.

David Malosh for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Vivian Lui.

In this week’s Five Weeknight Dishes newsletter, Ali Slagle offers a summer recipe scrapbook of easy meals that take around 20 minutes to make, including shrimp bathed in olive oil, cumin and cashew yogurt rice, and sardines on buttered brown bread.

NOW TIME TO PLAY

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Can you put eight historical events — including the performances of Mozart, the conquests of the Mongols, and the creation of the Slinky — in chronological order? Take this week’s Flashback quiz.

And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Sudoku, Connections and Strands.

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Editor’s note: The Interview is off this week. It will return next week.

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