Saving pennies as a kid taught me a lot about economics, but I’m glad to see the Trump administration had the nerve to say “enough” and call for a halt of minting new coins.

My native state of Idaho is one of the top three zinc-producing states in the country. One of the reasons the penny has been around so long is because if zinc — the primary metal now used in pennies — is no longer needed then those mines won’t produce as much, affecting people who rely on them for job.

There are over a billion pennies in circulation with whose knows how many lying on city streets, jingling in forgotten jars and socks or are part of coin collections.

Collecting coins as a teen was a lot of fun. I often visited a coin store after receiving my allowance to see if I could find “cheap” coins. Well, pennies were cheap and easy to buy.

My first effort at “market dominance” was to go to a bank and buy rolls of uncirculated pennies — each roll containing 100 cents — because the coin magazines I read reported an uncirculated 1970 penny, for example, could be “sold” for 15 cents.

Once I had about 2,000 pennies ($20 worth), I lugged them down to the coin store in hopes of tripling my investment. That’s when the owner of the store shared with me a fundamental of economics: Supply and demand.

Patiently, this guy said that “yes, pennies could be bought for 15 cents if there were only a few available.” But, he explained, there were millions of pennies in the country and even those beautiful, uncirculated pennies weren’t worth buying or even selling, unless they were “unique,” or “rare.”

That’s when I started looking for old “wheat ear” pennies, which have two shafts of wheat on the reverse side of the coin. They are rarer than the “Lincoln Memorial” pennies, minted decades later.

Today I have many rolls of “wheat ears,” and many rolls of uncirculated pennies from the 1970s — which I still can’t sell.

Nonetheless, I’m glad to see pennies finally finding their way into the dustbin of history because they aren’t all that practical. For example, the Associated Press reported, “a bedrock of American culture is the price tag ending in $.99, somehow trying to convince buyers that the 1-cent difference keeping the cost from the next dollar makes it a good deal.”

My wife often has plenty to say about the “good deals” I found when shopping.

Frank Holt, an emeritus professor at the University of Houston who has studied the history of coins in his work, was quoted by AP as saying about pennies, “It’s not just an economic argument, because pennies and all coins are embedded in our culture.

“They reflect our politics, our religion, our art, our sense of ourselves, our ideals, our aspirations,” he says. “We put mottos on them and self-identifiers and we decide — in the case of the United States — which dead persons are most important to us and should be commemorated.”

And, as AP also reported, news of the penny’s fate came out on the eve of Lucky Penny Day, May 23.

“We don’t have a lucky nickel day. We don’t have a lucky dime day, lucky quarter day, we only have a Lucky Penny Day,” Holt says. “And why is that? It’s more than money. It is more than an economic tool. We’ve endowed the penny with almost mystical, magical powers to bring us luck, to change our fortunes.”

Jim Smith is the former editor of The Daily Democrat, retiring in 2021 after a 27-year career at the paper.