Its not about the crazies, its about giving the non-crazies some cover from them. The idea is absurd, of course. But if the comparatively sane Pubbies have this prospect, they can say “Sure, I’d love to send the US economy straight to Hell, but the Muslim guy has a hole card, and its wild, so we lose anyway. Might as well look responsible, since we won’t win anyway. Who was that mosqued man? I wanted to thank him…”
… all he left was this platinum bullet …
ISTM that this is a weaselly way to avoid saying that you never considered this and have no clue.
Possibly he could, if he actually addressed the issue. But he didn’t.
FTR I’m not claiming that this “bullion” argument is valid. I have no idea. What I am claiming is that you also have no idea, and are now in a pathetic scramble to back up your rhetoric.
Great, I’m glad to know you are on board with this. Look, I’m not going to lie about how much money we need. This is going to take a lot of money but we can’t let that stop us. Send everything you possibly can to me and I’ll get started right away.
Well, apparently it’s the stupid part of the idea that the NRCC wants to argue about, or bring the public’s attention to.
You are of course perfectly entitled to find this course of action, as well as/or this particular objection to the plan to be positively pants-on-head retarded. I daresay, avowed WAG and all, that the majority of registered Democrats on this board do too. Bipartisan compromise ahoy.
That’s, however, not the point your appointed representatives seem intent on discrediting or fighting just this minute.
There are two big pluses to the idea
- I’d love to see the Republicans gnash their teeth when their deficit ceiling blackmail is removed.
- Spock could use it to build his memory circuit more efficiently.
This entire thread, and no one brought up the Triganic Pu?
Would the islanders on Yap just chip out another big stone wheel if they came up a little short for the grocery bill?
There was an editorial, I’m not sure if it was on CNN, where someone suggested that while a single trillion dollar coin was clearly absurd, the idea of multiple coins with denominations in the billions, or better, in the millions, may be more feasible and actually useful in some business transactions. The author did not give any specific recommendations as to denominations.
But let’s say, for example, the Government decided to mint 100,000 platinum coins with a face value of $10 million each, for a total of $1 trillion. If a business wanted to keep cash on hand, having one or more of these coins locked in a vault would not be completely stupid.
The coin or coins aren’t intended for circulation or possession by the public.
Cite? The law is specifically for platinum coins for collectors or bullion purposes but doesn’t stop them from being legal currency.
That isn’t a half bad idea. Make them for 100 million each, with serial numbers and sell a few to coin collectors with lots of money. The problem being that the rarest coin I have, a 1995 W silver eagle, has a mintage of 35,000 or so, and is only worth about $3k.
Every article I’ve read about this says that the idea is to mint one coin and deposit it with the Federal Reserve. The creation of such a coin would simply be a way to utilize a legal loophole to get around prohibitions on the creation of dollars.
I’ve seen no mention of putting it into circulation. It wouldn’t make sense to do so, and nobody has seriously suggested it (other than you).
How many hookers and how much blow could the Federal Reserve buy with a trillion dollars?
Exactly; if it actually were applied to the National Debt, it would be inflationary. But as long as it is kept isolated, and U.S. creditors know that it won’t be fobbed off on them, it isn’t inflationary. It just artificially raises the debt ceiling, which Congress will eventually have to do anyway.
It’s stupid…but they’re being stupider.
Who’s my appointed representative?? The guy in the OP who is making the ridiculous claim we need $1 trillion in value for a $1 trillion dollar coin isn’t from my state afaik, so isn’t my representative regardless. Personally, I find both the idea of a $1 trillion dollar coin only slighly less absurd than the idea that we’d need to back in with platinum (though I have to think that the platinum bit wasn’t said in all seriousness, considering the graphic from the OP with a huge coin with Obama’s picture sinking the Titanic).
Fox News gets in on the game, pointing out that a trillion-dollar platinum coin would weigh 17,773.995 tons (I appreciate their precision), equivalent to 83 blue whales or one ballistic missile sub (cite from Talking Points Memo). They scroll these figures across the screen without comment during an apparently serious business show. The *business show *doesn’t understand how currency works.
And, to get this out of the way now, I stipulate that some left-wing blog somewhere once said something stupid about something else entirely.
Of course I never considered it. I don’t stay up nights reading obscure sections of the U.S. Code.
But the part about the longstanding divorce between the face value and the intrinsic value of a U.S. coin is true. It’s even got a name: seigniorage. And it’s an accepted fact of life that the U.S. Mint reduces the deficit to some slight degree through seigniorage.
He did. He said that other parts of the statute don’t undo the plain meaning of the part that says that platinum coins of any denomination can be minted.
IANAL. But Laurence Tribe is a lawyer, and one with a pretty high reputation.
OTOH, I have yet to see or hear the anti-coin folks produce *any *lawyer, of reputation high, low, or nonexistent, to demolish the pro-coin arguments.
So how about if you kindly STFU until such time as you’ve got something meaningful to say?
To take a semiotic/deconstruction view of it, his comments already are meaningful. Whether or not they are totally wrong or just mostly is a question that has no bearing on “meaning”. You should offer a snide and ironic apology, as the situation demands.
Still image of that graphic. And in addition to not understanding seigniorage, they also have a problem with math. 17 million tons is vastly more than 93 blue whales or a submarine would weigh.