The Penny Lottery

I wrote about the potential abolition of the penny a few weeks ago. Also, thanks to a great comment on the previous post, you can read this article as well.

When I first wrote about the abolition of the penny, I was fortunate enough to have lunch with The Actual God shortly thereafter. It was then that we discussed how best to go about this abolition. This is the idea that we came up with:

Our plan would be both fun and a potential money-maker for the government (I think...)

The basic idea is that every person who wanted to would bring all his/her pennies to the local bank and for each penny that he/she turned in, he/she would get a lottery ticket. Once all the pennies in the country were collected (over a month-long period to build penny fever?) for the lottery, or simply exchanged for bigger denominations and taken out of circulation that way, there would be a televised drawing determining the lucky penny lottery winners. There are two possibilities we came up with for the lottery. Either simply choose 10 (or 25? or 50?) winners stepping up in prize from bottom winner to 1st place (a huge prize it seems...something like $100 million?). This would be one 2 hour TV special. Or to make it even better for TV, the first group of 100 winners (or whatever) could be chosen. Every person here would win a prize. Then there could be shows whittling down the number of people eligible for the Grand Prize, before we finally had a winner. The excitement would be unbelievable!

Either way, the government would take a cut and make a lot of money off this venture. It seems like everybody would win. Especially the lottery winners.