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Micawber's pivotal 'six' around which revolved the antipodes of bliss and blight referred to the sixpence, which inflation cast into limbo long before decimalisation did, rendering it into a quaint curiosity. At that time, the world's richest individual, US billionaire J Paul Getty remarked that 'a London taxi can turn on a sixpence — whatever that is,' displaying lofty dismissiveness of the British coin in terms both monetary and metaphoric.
Now Donald Trump has made the US penny, a.k.a. the cent, an endangered specie, calling for its further production to be scrapped. 'Let's rip the waste out of our great nation's budget, even if it's a penny at a time,' he declared. It's not known whether Trump's targeting of the penny has been prompted by his Artful DOGEr, Elon Musk, who has been tasked with trimming America's financial flab.
The US Mint's annual report revealed that last year it cost 3.69 ¢ to produce and circulate a single penny, giving each coin a negative value of 2.69 ¢. The phasing out of the copper coin, first minted in 1797 and representing 100th of a dollar, has been mooted before. Thanks to inflation, and the rising cost of the metal used for its making, the penny has become prohibitively costly.
There is an estimated quarter trillion of these coins in circulation, more than 700 for each person. Pennies have little or no value,
