Beware Penny Lovers!

At least the cents get used. They keep making dollars to sit in storage.

No they make a profit on the half dollars because they sell almost all of them to collectors for well over face value.

Zinc cents won't be around for 40 years. They rot too fast for that.

Our taxes are probably just as high as many other countries but we spread it out so much that we don't ever see much of the taxes we really pay. A small country like Iceland shows it taxes more readily. Didn't Iceland go broke because it invested in our real estate fiasco as a country? It was trying to ride out coattails and ended riding them into the sun with us.

Anyway back to coins. I don't see the problem with a coin that costs more than face value to make. I am not sure when we became so concerned about that meaningless fact. In the 1800s, all silver and gold coins cost more than face value to make because they contained their face value in precious metal so the entire cost of production went on top of that and it was never a problem. There is no grand economic issue with the initial cost, It was always an issue when people would start hoarding the metal and buying coins at face and melting them down and selling the metal but no one is going to make any money melting pennies for a long time to come. It costs too much to separate the copper and zinc and it takes an awful lot of pennies to make any real profit anyway. Coins are used and reused so many times that their cost as a medium of exchange is extremely low. I am going to say it again, the only reason to worry about a coin that costs mare than face to make is if you have good reason to believe that people are going to rob you by buying the coins en masse and melting them for profit. If that is not happening then there is no issue. I also don't think that the copper plated zince cents will have any problem going 40 years. I see lots of 25 year old ones that still look fine. Granted, they will not have the lifetime of the bronze coins but they are still pretty darn good. I for one am not ready to start rounding the cost of goods and/or taxes to the nearest nickel or dime.