Get rid of the penny

Over the years I have made some very good investments and some poorly chosen ones.  Those that were poorly chosen were mostly small cost risky investments where my losses were not significant.

Our government doesn't seem to understand the difference between the word spending and the word investing.  Generally speaking, when you spend you do so to purchase some goods or services, or make an expenditure to create some lasting good.

Normally when we invest we expect a return of an amount greater than the investment.  Obviously the government doesn't follow in that expectation.  A recent program on 60 Minutes showed how the penny was made.  The tour guide said that they make several million pennies per day.  According to Wikipedia, as of 2010, it cost the U.S. Mint 1.79 cents to make a cent because of the cost of materials and production.  They do not, however, make any reference to how much it costs to maintain the presses, how much it costs for the worker's retirement program, health insurance, building heating and cooling or any other miscellaneous expenditures.  They also did not include the cost of packaging, handling and shipping.  The return on the 1.79 cent investment is 1 cent.

Now, I ask you, would you be willing to take a continuous loss of more than 55.8%?  According to the mint they produce several million per day.  For the sake of this discussion, let us say that several means 3.  3 million pennies cost $53700.00 to produce and the government gets $30,000.00 in return.  That is a loss of $23000.00 per day.  That is an $8,395,000 loss on an investment of $19,600,500.   If any major corporation did that, they would be bankrupt and probably draw a congressional investigation into their corporate practices.

I don't know about you, but I am a businessman and if I made those kind of investments I would have to close my business and go to work for someone else.

The most profitable coin the government makes is the Sacagawea dollar.  The government announced that they were going to quit producing them.  A dollar bill will last about 18 to 22 months (according to the US Treasury Department).   A dollar coin, on the other hand is expected to last an average of 30 years.

Do you think that there is a motive at play here?  Maybe there is a threat to some government jobs if something they make lasts more than 16 times as long as the other product.   We all need to become suspicious of any organization that looses money on purpose. Posted by Forex Growth Bot .