Last Week Tonight: John Oliver, Pennies At Odds; Host Address U.S. Goverment Issue!
In the last episode of "Last Week Tonight," John Oliver discussed pennies, and how ending it could be the best option for the U.S. economy, according to Time. Oliver pointed out that it actually costs 1.7 cents just to make one, so producing the 8 billion pennies each year would mean losing millions for the government.
Aside from doing the math on "Last Week Tonight," John Oliver enumerated pennies' other issues, as listed by RollingStone. He mentioned health scares for pets, like when how a dog swallowed more than a hundred pennies. He also noted that some businesses actually refuse to accept pennies as payment, and that some people just throw these coins in the trash.
He also mentioned of the experiment that local reporters do from time to time: throwing pennies in the street and see how many people pick them up. So far, most of them say that no one bothered to pick up these coins.
In typical "Last Week Tonight" fashion, John Oliver used pennies to joke about other issues. Oliver points out that there is no material cheaper than the metal used for pennies, which is zinc. The only thing cheaper would be to use DVD copies of "The Cosby Show," following Bill Cosby's rape allegations, as reported by Time.
In addition, Oliver also picked on Director M. Night Shyamalan, saying that spending millions to make trash should just be his job and not the U.S. Mint's, reports RollingStone.
Oliver pointed out that it is possible to drop such an iconic but worthless symbol, because countries like Canada, Ireland, and Australia already did, according to Entertainment Weekly. He also noted that the U.S. already did that with the half-penny, back in 1857, when they deemed it useless because of the inflation.
The modern-day penny has no more purchasing power, and is just a nuisance as it is now, but Oliver believes that it is a "nuisance that we could actually do something about," according to Rollingstone.
