Fixing the Economy for Dummies

Note: This is not serious.

Right now, we’re drowning slowly under $14.79 trillion of debt. Congress has spent the last few years cooperating in a fruitful way to find an answer that will make everyone happy, and I’m sure they’ll come up with a plan soon, but if not, I have a solution.

It’s simple. We kill the Batman.

Ignore that. We can actually use easy math and perfectly sound logic to solve the debt! I’m right because I have a high amount of ethos because I’m right. Don’t doubt me.

My idea is to use the smelted down materials of coins to fund the United States Debt.

Currently, we have about 200 billion pennies in circulation right now. Most pennies are either made of zinc or copper; from 1962 to 1982, they were about 95 percent copper and 5 percent zinc, and since 1982, they’ve been about 97.5 percent zinc and 2.5 percent copper. Also, we don’t really care about older pennies, since they’re probably in antique stores or something. According to the internet (which is never wrong), the average age of the penny is 20 years with a standard deviation of 10 years. That means that about 84.1% of pennies are post-1982, and 15.7% of pennies were made between 1962 and 1982.

Therefore, about 168,200,000,000 pennies are 97.5 percent zinc and 2.5% copper. With each penny being about 441.8 mm³, that would be about 88,360 m³ of pennies (enough to fill 35 Olympic swimming pools!). That’s about 3.08 grams of zinc and 99mg of copper in each 1982+ penny. That’s about 518,100 metric tons of zinc and 16,652 metric tons of copper. For the 31,400,000,000 pennies that were made between 1962 and 1982, I’ve calculated it to be about 118,000 metric tons of copper and 4,950 metric tons of zinc.

In total, we’d have 523,050 metric tons of zinc and 134,652 metric tons of copper. At the current exchange rate of about $7230.99 per metric ton of copper, we’d have about $973.7 million dollars in copper; with an exchange rate of $3400.00 per metric ton of zinc, we have $1,778.37 million dollars in zinc. That’s a total of $2,752,070,000 from the metal.

You might be asking, “Wait a second; don’t we only have about 200 billion pennies? That’s only $2 billion in how much they’re worth!”

That’s the point! That’s a profit of 752 million! Using pure and indisputable logic, we can only assume that if we convert all of our currency into pennies and do the same, that we can eventually make infinity dollars! And to think that this is all it takes!

Warning: This does not actually work. If we were to melt down pennies and sell all of the raw materials, it would eventually cost us more to turn them into raw materials than it would be worth in the end. Additionally, with the influx of copper and zinc, the prices would drop for both, eventually leading us to a net loss in money. One more thing – if we converted all of our money into pennies, we’d have to buy the copper to make it, which would also lead to a loss in profit. Too bad it doesn’t actually work. Our best bet would actually be to cut down on spending and increase taxes (Boo! Hiss!), and try to take a long-term approach to slowly rebuild the economy. But hey, I’m just a disclaimer. Ignore me.