A rant.
What is with all these rich people who constantly want to eliminate the penny?
I say keep the penny. It doesn’t have to be copper. It can be of any metal because the penny isn’t dependent upon copper for it’s value. The penny itself, whether of copper or of base metals, is important to many Americans – those who live at or below the poverty level and who glean the pennies dropped by their wealthier neighbors so they can buy a day old loaf of bread, or a bunch of blackened bananas discounted for their over-ripeness – or to eke out a bit of gasoline, hopefully enough to get them to work to earn their miniscule paycheck.
I've been among those Americans most of my life.
Not all Americans are rich enough to ignore the pennies, all you wealthy, inconsiderate folks. We’re already carpooling and walking as much as possible to save on gasoline, and working longer hours hoping for more pay (except our bosses figure out new and demeaning ways to avoid paying for the extra hours, let alone for overtime), growing some of our food, wearing the same clothes for years (I haven't bought new clothes or shoes in 11 years), shopping the discount stores and the day-old bakeries – a small but significant savings. We’ve stopped eating out, stopped visiting families and friends, stopped watching movies in theaters, stopped having telephones, cable TV, or heating or cooling in our homes because we lack enough of the pennies you so want to eliminate. Meat, milk, cheese, and fresh fruit are being eliminated from our diets because the prices are so high. We rarely could afford new clothes, now we can’t even afford used clothes.
And these are the honest, hard-working people who put in 40, 60, or more hours a week, often at or below minimum wage – productive Americans who should be able to support themselves off their paycheck.
It’s a sad world we live in when hard-working people can’t support themselves off their wages. It means rich people like you are hoarding the money among the wealthy instead of letting it “trickle down”. The discrepancy in wages between the highest paid employees in a company and the lowest paid is shamefully large.
Yes, yes, the rich people deserve what they earn – but so do the poor people who work long hard hours and have to pass all sorts of onerous and intrusive tests and comply with onerous, intrusive, and ridiculous restrictions. The least paid employees should be able to afford a home, food, transportation, clothing, a small bit of fun, and still be able to save a bit for emergencies and retirement.
They worked for that, they earned that with their labor and their skills and their knowledge and their time - time, skills, effort, and knowledge you've stolen for a pittance instead of the fair wage they should have gotten. I work hard for my paycheck. I certainly don't show up every day and do the work of 5 people for the love of the work - I need to eat, buy fuel to get to and from work, pay my utilities, eat, and that's why I come to work. I exchange my skills, effort, time, knowledge, and abilities for pay and right now, I'm thinking you don't appreciate the work I and so many other Americans like me do for you.
What's even worse is that the people like me, we're the ones who support your business through more than just our skills, labor, knowledge, and time - we're the ones who used to spend our money in your businesses, keeping them profitable. When you choked up the money flow, stopped passing it down to those of us who work for the money, you cut your own profits, you know. With no money coming back to us for our work, we have no money to shell out for new cars, new TVs, new clothes, new shoes, warm winter coats, food, leisure activities, fuel to heat and cool our homes, or even to have homes.
You, all you rich people with sticky fingers, you're the reason the penny is so vitally important. You don't care about pennies. Pennies are nothing to you. Less than nothing. They clutter up and weigh down your pockets and purses, so you dump them, shedding pennies wherever you can - and all the gods help us, we're grateful for those discarded pennies because we can gather them up and roll them in penny wrappers and use them to pay for a few more drops of gasoline to get us to work in your businesses, to supplement the excuse of paycheck you give us for our hard work, to buy a bag of beans or rice to feed our families, to make up the difference between "not enough" and "barely enough" - and sometimes, at the checkout, we depend upon others who are also struggling to help us bridge that infinitesimal yet yawning chasm between the "not enough" and the amount owed. Pennies.
People like you are the reason people like me need those pennies you so scorn.
Make the pennies of base metal (but not plastic, as that would further drive oil prices up, plastic being oil, yanno); we don’t care what the penny is composed of so long as we still have pennies to glean and pennies to spend.