President Donald Trump’s announcement that he was ordering the Treasury Department to stop minting pennies was cheered on by a group of Washington Post columnists on the paper’s Impromptu podcast.

Trump posted on his Truth Social account earlier this month that he was ending penny production because each one “literally cost us more than 2 cents,” which he described as “so wasteful!” Unlike some of his other nominations and actions during these first few weeks of his second term, this move has been far less controversial and even garnered bipartisan praise.

Post columnists Drew Goins, Molly Roberts, and Megan McArdle discussed the end of the penny in the latest Impromptu episode, posted on Monday with an article headlined, “Junk the penny. And the nickel and dime, too!”

McArdle commented that if she sees a penny on the street, “I don’t bother to lean down and pick it up.”

“It’s not worth my time,” Goins agreed. “I walk right past it. I try to step on it, like a crunchy leaf.”

“Stopping the production of pennies could actually make some sense,” said Roberts. “No pun intended, I promise. It does cost more to mint one than it’s worth.”

The group of columnists agreed that with people increasingly moving to digital forms of payment and the ongoing march of inflation, the penny had outlived its usefulness.

McArdle noted that many people “do not remember when you could actually buy something with a penny,” with penny candy a thing of the past and pennies mostly being used when retailers deploy “that sad trick” of ending a price with .99 because of the psychological effect on customers.

“I think it’s very difficult to make an unsentimental, logical pro-penny case unless you’re a zinc manufacturer,” said Roberts.

Goins offered a vocabulary lesson with the word “seigniorage,” which means the profit the government makes when it issues currency, calculated in this case as the difference between the face value of a penny and the costs to produce one. Pennies had a “negative utility” for businesses too, because the time it takes to deal with a penny at a cash register was worth more than a penny.

Taking “zinc and a little bit of copper” to make pennies meant diverting these resources to “these teeny, tiny metal discs that have absolutely no use,” Goins continued. “More than two-thirds of pennies that are minted go out of circulation almost immediately because people just don’t use them.” The machines at zoos at other tourist attractions that smash pennies into commemorative tokens could be retooled to smash nickels instead, he argued — “perhaps even more space on which to emboss a little picture of a kangaroo” — or even quarters, since nickels also have a negative seigniorage.

Goins and McCardle took it a step further and argued to “get rid of the penny, the nickel, and the dime,” although Roberts was not on board with that.

“As far as Donald Trump’s policy proposals go,” said Roberts, “abolishing the penny isn’t actually especially outlandish. He’s far from the first politician to want to do it. He’s far from even the first president to want to do it. I’m pretty sure Barack Obama said we should get rid of the penny, too. Why isn’t it gone?”

There had been lobbying by zinc manufacturers, said Goins, but it had spent only about $3 million since the mid-aughts. The real obstacle to eliminating the penny, he said, was “political inertia” and “preference intensity,” where politics are affected by the fact that “a small group of people cares a lot and a large group of people cares a little.” He added that his personal preference would be to drop the penny and nickel, keep the dime, “radically” increase the minting of 50-cent pieces, and make prices be “only to one decimal place.”

Listen to the full podcast here.

The post Washington Post Columnists Back Trump’s Move to Ditch the Penny — ‘And the Nickel and Dime, Too!’ first appeared on Mediaite.

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