The penny is the one coin that inspires hope in people. It is small and insignificient to many but some of us bend down to pick them up, knowing they have been left by an angel to remind us that we are not insignificient.
Give a few shiney new ones to a young child, and watch the glow on their face. Show them how to save them in a bank until it is full. teach themn to save and plan for the future. The penny has a great job to do in teaching our children.

Awesome, will you foot the bill for the waste involved in minting pennies? Have the kids bend down and pick up dimes.

When we were kids(70’s and 80’s) we would put a penny on the railroad tracks and come back after the train ran over them. Even then, pennies were useless. I still bend over to pick one up in the parking lot, but it is such an insignificant piece of metal and a complete waste of resources that we would be better off doing away with them.

I agree with Paulson that he presently has more important things to worry about, just as Congress should have more important things to worry about than whether Roger Clemens took steroids or not.

Eliminating the penny is a no-brainer. A more significant improvement would be to replace the dollar bill with a dollar coin that is easily distinguishable from the quarter. I recently visited New Zealand, where their dollar (worth about 80 U.S. cents) is a coin, and they also have a 2 dollar coin. Their lowest denominated bill is 5 dollars. I and the other Americans in my tour group all agreed that it was a much better system than ours.

If the Fed continues on its hyper-inflation campaign, we’ll be questioning the viability of the dollar itself before long.