MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
This week, President Trump became the latest U.S. president to say he wants to kill the penny. Both Republicans and Democrats have tried and failed for decades to get rid of America's 1-cent coin. NPR financial correspondent Maria Aspan reports.
(SOUNDBITE OF COINS CLINKING)
MARIA ASPAN, BYLINE: I decided to sort through my jar of loose change this week, and I quickly discovered that it was mostly pennies.
Oh, there's one more. All right, I've been storing 113 pennies on my bookshelf for years. Great.
There are some 240 billion pennies in circulation, according to some estimates. And most of them are, like mine, just sitting around, taking up space. Robert Whaples is an economics professor at Wake Forest University.
ROBERT WHAPLES: We're the culprits here. We don't value the penny enough to even bring a lot of our change back to the store.
ASPAN: That means the store has to ask the bank for more pennies, and then eventually, the Mint has to make more pennies, and it loses a lot of money. It costs almost 4 cents to make each new 1-cent coin. Last year, the U.S. Mint lost more than $85 million making new pennies. Now President Trump says he's ordered his Treasury secretary to stop making pennies. And unlike most of Trump's recent executive actions, this one is getting bipartisan support.
PHILIP DIEHL: All for it and long overdue.
ASPAN: Philip Diehl is a Democrat who ran the U.S. Mint in the '90s. He's been calling for the end of the penny for decades. In the big picture, eliminating the penny wouldn't save all that much money for the government. But economists say it would make all of our lives better. For example, stores could just round up or down to the nearest 5 cents when we pay with cash. Research has shown that there's no real cost to consumers when stores do this, and it's exactly what Canada has been doing for more than a decade.
ROBERT TRIEST: I think the lesson is that it's not a big deal. Canada's economy continued to run smoothly when they abolished the penny.
ASPAN: That's Robert Triest. He's a professor of economics at Northeastern University. He points out that most transactions aren't even in cash anymore. And even for lower-income consumers who tend to rely more on cash, the penny just isn't valuable enough to make a difference. Meanwhile, Diehl says that if the government does stop minting new pennies, there might be a little copper lining for the penny hoarders among us.
DIEHL: They might be worth a couple cents in a few years. You won't pay for anybody's college education.
ASPAN: But maybe a penny saved will become slightly more than a penny earned.
Maria Aspan, NPR News, New York.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "PENNIES FROM HEAVEN")
FRANK SINATRA: (Singing) Pennies from heaven. Don't you know every cloud contains lots of pennies from heaven? Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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