Wednesday, January 16, 2013

The useless coin

In Robert Whaples opinion piece, "Why keeping the penny no longer makes sense", the author writes about how pennies are useless and literally worthless.
Robert Whaples uses ethos to support his claim when he says, "Harvard's Greg Mankiw, former chairman of President Bush's Council of Economic Advisers, has said: "When people start leaving a monetary unit at the cash register for the next customer, the unit is too small to be useful."" This is useful to his argument because Mankiw was a chairman on former president Bush's council of economic Advisers, and he said that the penny is useless. Another example of ethos is that in the same quote he added the part that he is a Harvard graduate which means he is smart.
Also, Robert Whaples uses logos to support his claim in the paragraph when he says, "Conservative estimates of the value of our time lost using pennies exceed $300 million per year." This is basically saying that we lose 300 million dollars per year because it cost more to make pennies then the actual penny is worth.
I agree with his article because the U.S. government is wasting unnecessarily large amounts of money on they penny, which you can't even buy anything with. The penny was useful in the past when one cent was an actual difference, but in the present a one cent difference is unimportant. Also, Canada got rid of their equivalent of the penny and nothing bad has happened to them. The only question I'm left with, is when are we going to get rid of the penny.




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