Last month I wrote a facetious post, mocking what struck me as a ridiculous idea.
The government can mint two platinum coins, declare they are worth $1 trillion each, deposit them at the Fed, and then move the money directly into Treasury accounts.
Don’t laugh! Economists are actually endorsing this harebrained idea…
That was then. A whole month ago. Commenters thought it was funny and I sort of forgot about it. Surely, I thought, this was one of those ideas that will never go anywhere.
Wrong. Not only has this ridiculous idea not gone away, but it is being called “The Most Important Fiscal Policy Debate You’ll Ever See In Your Life“:
The campaign to circumvent the debt ceiling by having the Treasury mint a trillion dollar platinum coin continues to infiltrate the minds of elite thinkers in Washington.
Paul Krugman has come out in favor of it. Congressman Jerry Nadler is in favor of it. Pretty much every major news organization is discussing it. Even Stephen Colbert talked about it last night.
As Jonathan Chait at NYMag observes, what’s interesting is that there are very few good arguments, legal or economic, against minting the coin.
Most of the critics’ arguments basically boil down to: It’s just not serious, and it would make the US monetary and political system look like a farce.
Yeah, it’s on the level of some Third World tyrant like Idi Amin deciding that because he wants more money and has control of the printing presses, he can just print it and that takes care of everything.
The reason things like that look like a farce is because they are farcical.
UPDATE: Mickey Kaus speculates that minting the coin might help Republicans.
Is the farce deepening?
Comments
7 responses to “The Most Important Comedy You’ll Ever See In Your Life”
Here’s my argument against it. People who have studied economics or thought about it know that we have fiat money with no intrinsic value.
Rubbing it in the face of everyone else is just a bad idea.
I am in favor of the idea so long as the mint the coins out of plutonium rather than platinum.
I’m not so sure there’s no legal argument against it, but it definitely shows you where their minds are at. Some sort of money-printing escapade like this was both predictable and predicted.
They’re going to print away the debt, whether there’s a coin involved or not.
“They’re going to print away the debt, whether there’s a coin involved or not”
I think you missed a “TRY TO” somewhere in there. Along with a “and fail.”
I hope I’m wrong.
Still don’t believe we’re in the Funniest End of Civilization ever?
If you had written a story in 1975 exactly detailing the last 10 years you would have been ridiculed as being a paranoid moron.
Essentially the same idea was proposed by Bo Gritz when he ran for president in 1992. The coin was to be made of pot metal and used to pay off the entire debt, which at the time was $4 trillion. Most people thought he was a little insane. Only my father and a couple of other people voted for him.
I think a thousand billion dollar coins would work better at hardly any additional cost.