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It's a loss for the Mint, which sells coins at face value to the Fed. The Mint is taxpayer funded, so there really was a $20MM loss of taxpayer money in 2009.

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It's a cost to the taxpayer for a tactile service to the economy. Paving our roads was an enormous cost to the tax payers, but that doesn't bother anyone. Whats the difference between having roads to drive on, and having physical money to trade with?

If the government could change the way they pave roads to save money while still having the same quality of road, it would be good for them to do so.

If they could make pennies for cheaper, it would be good to do so.

I think you're blowing the importance of pennies out of proportion. Lower-quality pennies would not suddenly mean we don't have physical money to trade with — we could do away with pennies entirely and the only difference it would make to our physical money system is that cashiers could be a lot faster.

Not only that, but if this story is to be believed, we could have a lot more useful physical money if we stopped wasting millions on pennies.

According to Wikipedia, there were 2.354 billion pennies minted in 2009. At a cost of $0.0162/penny, that's $38MM of taxpayer money spent making pennies. Whether the mint gets part of its funding in the form of money it mints is irrelevant.

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