BREAKING: President Trump instructs Treasury to stop producing pennies
“Let’s rip the waste out of our great nations budget, even if it’s a penny at a time.”
As the Super Bowl went into the 4th quarter on Sunday, President Donald Trump announced an end to pennies. Pennies, those copper-colored, Abe Lincoln embossed coins, bigger than a dime but one tenth of their value, will no longer be made by the US Treasury. Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent will be tasked with making the elimination.
“For far too long the United States has minted pennies which literally cost us more than 2 cents,” Trump noted. “This is so wasteful! I have instructed my Secretary of the US Treasury to stop producing new pennies. Let’s rip the waste out of our great nations budget, even if it’s a penny at a time.” Behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office, Trump has a sculpture of Lincoln that resembles the penny portrait.
The push to end pennies has been ongoing for decades, but no president has seen fit to eliminate the smallest value coin. Canada eliminated their pennies in 2012 for the same reason—to save money. Just like in the US, the cost of printing the penny cost more than the value of the penny itself.
In 2013, the Brookings Institute penned an anti-penny missive, saying “pennies and nickels cost more to make than they are worth. A penny costs nearly 2 cents to make, a nickel nearly 8 cents. And since the U.S. mint has minted nearly 92 billion pennies 15 billion nickels since Y2K, the nation’s $1 billion loss making these coins is not, like the coins themselves, chump change. Back in 1940, and even much after that, we got along just fine without coins that bought as little as pennies and nickels do today.”
Trump also declared on Sunday that henceforth, February 9 would be known as Gulf of America Day. This comes after he has remade a bit of the US map, changing the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America and renaming Alaska’s Denali to Mount McKinley.