Today, the United States minted its last penny, at least for the foreseeable future.

This should probably have been done decades ago, given rising production costs and inflation. But then, what would we use to buy gumballs, or to flatten-and-stamp into souvenirs, or to toss into fountains and wishing wells? Nickels? Please.

I doubt anyone outside of numismatists and coin collectors would have noticed, except for the announcements. Pennies will still circulate for a good long while, and some cash places will round up, or round down, or keep pennies near the register for convenience’s sake.

You’ll still see prices and bills ending in $.01, or $.02, and so on, just like we have gasoline and property taxes priced to the mill– a thousandth of a dollar– despite not having a mill coin since… ever.

Of course, you’ll also occasionally run into cashiers or vendors claiming that since physical pennies aren’t being minted anymore, abstract pennies somehow don’t exist anymore, so we have to round everything up. And then you’ll point out that they could just as easily round everything down. And then you’ll remind them of gasoline and property taxes, and they’ll act confused– or maybe they’ll actually be confused. New rounding schemes and new rounding scams will emerge, and… we’ll get used to them.

Anyhow. It disturbs me to think that the penny is rolling faster down the way of the dodo. I suspect that’s a little bit of worry about inflation, and a whole lot of shaking my fist at the clouds. To think that the obverse of the 1943 steel penny once served as favicon and graced the background of this august journal.

…

I am reminded of an open letter I wrote many years ago to then-President-elect Obama, in hopes of winning a patronage job:

7. Announce that pennies now count as nickels, and then slowly take them out of circulation, replacing them with real nickels. Put Lincoln on new dollar coins the size of the old Ike dollars. Also, start printing $500 bills again. I am not a crackpot.

–Me, “Advice as promised.”

Inflationary? Yes. As inflationary as anything else the feds have done in the meantime? No. Self-serving, given the countless rolls of pennies I’ve stashed in caches and safehouses all over the country? Possibly.