My 7.38 cents worth…

Grandpa said: “Watch the pennies and the dollars will take care of themselves.”

So now we learn that the government is going to stop making money.

In the literal sense…

Or should that be “cents?”

Yeah, it turns out that running the U.S. Mint is no penny-ante racket … especially since every penny is costing 3.69 cents to make – and that’s before the tariffs go into effect.

I guess having a government that’s managing to lose 2.69 cents on every penny it makes goes a long way to explain the national debt. It also makes having a guy who managed to go bankrupt in the casino business half a dozen times running that government.

But I digress…

Truth is, it’s strangely unsettling to think that our basic unit of commercial exchange costs more than it’s worth. It’s tantalizing to think that if our currency reflected the actual value of the humble penny, my net worth would virtually quadruple. What’s that Grandpa said: “Watch the pennies and the dollars will take care of themselves”?

Too bad somebody wasn’t watching those pennies they had been, maybe our basic unit of coinage would still have significant monetary value. The unfortunate fact is that for all practical purposes a single penny has become virtually worthless. What can you get for a penny? Well, a single play on a penny slot at the casino – except those machines don’t take real, shiny metal pennies anymore. If you can find an old Ford gumball machine in some forgotten corner, it might sell you a gumball. The “need a penny, leave a penny” tray at the Kwik Trip let’s you avoid collecting more pocket coins to clutter your car’s console of get lost in the couch – but that’s not really buying anything, is it?

‘T'wasn’t always thus… I grew up when pennies in your pocket was money in your pocket – not a lot, perhaps, but real, spendable cash. Cash redeemable for some of the things a nine-year-old life would treasure: Jawbreakers. Tootsie Rolls. Twizzlers; Bazooka Bubble Gum. Laid out at a third-grader’s eye level, Mae and Obert offered an array of penny candy to tempt and tantalize any and all – enough sugary-toothiness to make the adult me wonder if there wasn’t a kickback from the local dental clinics somehow involved. Back then, pennies were coins of value, and obtaining such was spur to considerable juvenile enterprise.

You see, the era of penny candy was also the era of the returnable pop bottle – beer bottle were, of course, also returnable, but even in those days of relatively lax legal-age enforcement, people standing barely four-foot tall were unwelcome in the municipal liquor store. But Obert and Mae not only sold penny candy, they paid 2 cents apiece for returned pop bottles – 3 cents for Spring Grove pop. We became diligent scavengers…lifting trash can lids, checking picnic spots, bicycling out to the town dump to cash in on the leavings of the careless and affluent. If they’d be long abandoned we’d shake out the cigarette butts, rinse out the cobwebs and let them dry in the sun … being a buyer’s market, there was no bounty for a dirty bottle,

Was it worth the effort? Well, a six-pack of Seven-Up empties could buy a stomach ache that would last half a day. Pennies, we quickly learned, became nickels, then dimes, and when a quarter-a-week was a standard kid’s allowance, find a case of Spring Grove empties and we were talking real money.

Nowadays a quarter rents a shopping cart at Aldi’s – and quite a few folks don’t bother returning the cart to get it back.

Seems that if it were ever to rain pennies from Heaven, folks wouldn’t even get wet.

There’s no cents to it…no cents at all.