I find the "You jerks are costing the country $12 million bucks an hour!" the most interesting story. What are we doing? There's no logic.

I wrote a newspaper column last week that among other things addressed the fact that according to the United States Mint, it costs almost two and a half cents to manufacture a penny. It costs over eleven cents to manufacture a nickel. The only arguments I’ve ever heard in defense of this practice are that people are nostalgic about pennies and also that it only costs eleven cents to manufacture a quarter, which helps to offset the cost of the penny and the nickel.
Do you see the logic there? I don’t. If you’re nostalgic about pennies, and I really don’t hear many conversations regarding the importance of pennies, hang on to a box of them and call it a day. Why would a country that’s possibly on the brink of financial disaster waste money to make money? Again, I realize it’s a minute amount of money in the grand scheme of things, but what’s the point?

Oh, and by the way, that tiny drop in the bucket from producing pennies for the year 2012 was a loss of fifty eight million dollars. That was down from 2011 when the loss for manufacturing them was sixty million dollars. That’s one hundred and eighteen million dollars loss to tax payers in just two years. Figure in the loss from manufacturing nickels and it’s about an additional forty million dollars a year.

Again, what's the logic. The government shutdown will probably cost us billions of dollars. Why are we doing these things.