Posted on Wednesday, May 28, 2025
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by Mike Fuljenz
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0 Comments
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Recently, an article titled “No longer making cents” ran in the Houston Chronicle that lacked some extremely important context. The same article ran in the Beaumont Enterprise and a similar article in the Wall Street Journal.
Most notably, all articles lacked transparency about who the “penny advocate” and Executive Director of the American for Common Cents group really is. Americans for Common Cents is run by one person – Washington-based lobbyist Mark Weller, according to a New York Times article, and he is funded by a major beneficiary of taxpayer money.
Artazn is that company. It funds the Americans for Common Cents group to defend the penny and divert attention to the nickel. At the same time, it is a government contractor receiving hundreds of millions of dollars to supply zinc to the U.S. Mint.
Tom Jurkowsky, a retired Navy Rear Admiral, who became the director of Corporate Communications for the U.S. Mint from 2009-2017, stated: “How silly it is how much money it costs to produce pennies.” Jurkowsky also noted that Artazn, the company the Treasury has contracted to manufacture zinc blanks for over 40 years, lobbies against efforts for penny reform.
In 2023, Artazn is reported to have received over $51 million from its U.S. Department of Treasury contract.
In January, when I interviewed U.S. Mint Director Ventris Gibson, she told me it costs over 4 cents to make a penny, a loss of 3 cents for each one made.
Previous Mint Directors, like Democrat Philip Diehl and Republican Ed Moy, agree with ending the penny. Moy said, “I went to Congress saying I’m losing $90 million a year on pennies. You guys need to pass a law forcing me to change it.”
In 2013, President Barack Obama suggested retiring the penny but wasn’t able to. “It’s very hard to get rid of things that don’t work,” he commented at the time.
Canada successfully stopped making the penny in 2012 and their people adjusted well to elementary math rounding rules, as did Finland, the Netherlands, Sweden, Australia and New Zealand.
As far as the biased Mark Weller red herring comments about additional losses the country may incur by needing to make more nickels if it eliminated pennies, it has been easily addressed by coin experts, like myself, who have consulted for the U.S. Mint and the Royal Canadian Mint.
The simple answer is that we need to reduce the size and weight of the circulating nickel, as other countries have done over the years with their coinage, and as America did previously, in 1857, with the penny. As you can see, this is not a precedent-setting idea.
The current U.S. nickel weighs 5 grams and is composed of 75% copper and 25% nickel.
The Mint could reduce the weight of the nickel from 5 grams to about 4 grams by using an alternative and less expensive base metal. Canada, Spain and Finland all have nickels that weigh 4 grams. I also argue that there would be little way to confuse a 4-gram nickel for a 2.7-gram dime.
One idea is that the U.S. Mint could change the composition to 94.5% steel with a 2.5% nickel plating, like Canada does. Currently, copper costs about $5 per pound and nickel costs about $7 per pound but steel is only 47 cents per pound. This results in over 10 times the savings in material costs.
Both options have been successfully implemented in other countries.
Yes, the nickel costs about 13.8 cents to make today, resulting in a loss of roughly 8.8 cents for each one and an overall loss of $18 million a year. That is far less than the $60 million to $100 million the country has lost for producing pennies each year for the past five years.
Even if nickel production increases by eliminating the penny the losses on making them can be mitigated if Congress and the Mint take one or both of the actions I previously noted.
This should not be a partisan issue. It currently has and has had in the past bipartisan support to save taxpayers money. The zinc lobby influencing Congress should no longer cost taxpayers tens of millions of dollars each year while enriching its benefactors and a lobbyist by any other name, like the Common Cents group, is still a lobbyist.
Read the full article here