Pennies. Actually worth less than a penny.

Since the early 1980s, the US Mint has plated pennies with what comes out to about 0.06 grams of copper per coin. The rest of the composition is made up of Zinc. The same is true of Nickel. Plating coins happens a lot (that is to say, a dime a dozen), and now it's set to happen some more. With all the hubbub of people talking about coinage in the US, I have to say talk is cheap. See, no one complains that a piece of paper labeled $100 is made from the same well that a piece of paper labeled $1 is made from. Why is that?

Because it doesn't matter.

According to Monday's Wall Street Journal it indeed does cost "the federal government up to nine cents to mint a nickel and almost two cents to make a penny." If the federal government knew anything they'd have figured out long ago that manufacturing nickel coins for almost double their literal nickel metal value was retarded. Yet, still metal lobbyist are fighting for the mentality that our currency is dependent upon actual metal value versus market forces. Obviously with the rising use of "plastic" credit and debit cards, check books and the complete nixing of the "Gold Standard" in 1971 by Richard Nixon, the argument that precious metals carry any weight when it comes to currency is for naught.

Old US Minting Facility in San Francisco, CA

Of course the abandonment of concrete metals as the standard has created a bit of an inflation, to say the least, but continuing to waste funds by minting coins for more than they're worth doesn't seem the right way to go either. It's as if someone simply missed the boat on how to go about minting, or at least is trying to stall it (eh, hem, metal lobbyists). And while the prices of metals like anything else will go up and down, in the end, gold is still gold — the real question is: is a penny still a penny if it's worth less than one, yet costs more to make it?