Its 17 thousand, not million. So their math is correctish, even if their economics is poor.
To be more specific, it’s ten pounds shy of 17,774 tons (using the definition of ton I learned as a child: 2000 pounds).
“Bullion” just means that the coin must in fact contain the weight and purity of metal indicated. Legal-tender face value is an independent inscription. The Supreme Court has said “the quality of legal tender of coin is an attribute of law aside from its bullion value.”
The funniest joke I’ve heard about this is that with a $1 trillion coin, you could finally afford to shop at Whole Foods.
Aside from the part where this… scheme… does not technically circumvent the authority of Congress wrt their stupid debt ceiling maneuvers, it is pretty silly. I think it would be better if the President simply invoked the 14th Amendment and told the pubbies to get in line, behind Boehner, and blow him serially. Because the debt cannot be questioned, you anti-Constitutional GOP quacks. The 14th Amendment seems a much more elegant and formal solution to me (aside from the blowing part), whereas this coin business comes across as some kind of James Bond fraternity prank. Just my 2 (trillion) cents…
Oh yeah, Obama coin sinks Titanic… I bet they are just eating that one up in the old Confederacy. :rolleyes:
Of course. But somehow that didn’t stop you from commenting pretty forcefully about an obscure section of the U.S. Code, something you admit you know nothing about.
That’s true. Potato chips also have a name. What of it?
But the claim being made here is that the specific law that allows platinum coins requires “bullion”. The fact that there are also coins that are not bullion is irrelevant.
He addressed whether a trillion dollar coin is a loophole and whether the government can increase the money supply by an unlimited amount through minting these coins. He did not address whether the “bullion” language in this particular law required that the metal be worth the assigned value.
Did you even read the Mother Jones cite that you so casually waved away? It says:
That’s good advice, if unnecessary in my case.
For you, I would suggest that before gleefully running off to mock your ideological opponents, you might educate yourself a bit on the issues at hand, so as to avoid acting like an ignorant fool.
There’s a process by which one goes from having never considered something previously, to knowing enough about it to comment. It involves reading, thinking, and whatnot.
I can understand your lack of familiarity with this process.
Things that don’t exist generally don’t have names. Like potato chips, seigniorage exists.
He may not have addressed it by name. But he said he read the rest of the law, and found nothing that would contravene the plain meaning of the section that allows unlimited denominations of platinum coins.
Yes. So we’ve got a secondhand opinion from an anonymous lawyer, versus Laurence Tribe of Harvard Law School.
Don’t worry - I won’t poach on your territory. 
That’s true. And it’s clear that at the time you posted your OP, you had not done any of that, and thus posted out of ignorance.
And it’s also clear that when confronted with this fact, in the form of evidence that what you had mocked actually had some reasonable basis, you were not honest about it. Instead, you first tried to vaguely wave it away by an ad hominem dismissal of the source, along with some handwaving about coins, and then tried to hide behind the implied authority of Lawrence Tribe.
Good point.
Now try to follow along here for the next step.
Even though both potato chips and seigniorage exist, the existence of neither of them necessarily carries the implication that under the specific law authorizing platinum coins the coins don’t need to contain their value in metal.
IOW you don’t get by just by tossing out a long word that you looked up. You actually have to make your case.
He didn’t address it at all. It’s very possible that he would say that you don’t need that amount of metal. But it’s also possible that he didn’t think of this particular issue, which is not what he was asked.
Of course. Laurence Tribe is one of the leading legal scholars in this country, and this other lawyer’s opinion carries no weight by comparison.
I’ve noted above that LT did not actually address this issue. But my point here was something else.
What you said was:
And you had ostensibly read this Mother Jones article. You were responding to it. And the article said clearly that a lawyer was the one putting out this argument. From which we can learn two things:
[ol]
[li]Your reading comprehension is very poor.[/li][li]When confronted with the fact that you’ve made an incorrect statement, you do not forthrightly admit it. Instead, you try to confuse the issue by pretending that your point was something other than what you actually said.[/li][/ol]
Of course, both of these things are things that can be seen from your other posts in this thread, as well as in other threads. Nothing new about this. But worth noting, nonetheless.
And one other point:
There is a reason you were so emphatic in saying that no other lawyer had put forth such an argument. Because your OP was not that the Republicans are wrong about some “obscure section of the U.S. Code”, having been contradicted by Laurence Tribe. Your point was that the Republicans are complete and utter fools, to the point that they don’t understand the basic concept of coins. If it should turn out that a reasonable lawyer might arrive at the conclusion that for this particular law you actually do need metal content of the assigned value, then your OP is revealed to be the ignorant bombast that it is. So you need for no lawyer of any sort to maintain that position, in order for you to retain some veneer of respectibility here. And that seems to be lost in any event. Laurence Tribe can’t help you with this.
BTW, here’s some commentary from The Volokh Conspiracy on whether a trillion dollar platinum coin would need to contain a trillion dollars of platinum.
Again, I myself have no position on which side is correct here. But it does seem that it’s not so clear cut, and the idea that it does need to is not a ridiculous one.
Worth reading the comment thread too, which does a pretty good job of rebutting the original post.
The regional whip reports directly to the whip, the second-highest ranking person; the regional whip is the third highest rank in the system.
Now that you know this, do you still believe it’s correct to call him a “backbencher?”
ETA: this attitude, on a board supposedly interested in fighting ignorance, amazes me.
“How dare you compare party leaders to a no-account backbencher?”
“Um… that guy wasn’t a backbencher – he was a regional whip.”
“Well, that sounds like a minor position to me!”
Oh, OK. Since it sounds to you like a minor position, that ought to end the inquiry right there. No need to actually investigate your intuition or anything.
We’re talking about the actions of people at the top of the RNC and you’re talking about a lower level officer.
Also, you don’t know that the Regional Whip actually was speaking literally. It might be a metaphor.
You know who else used metaphors? Jesus.
There are also a couple of updates to the article.
Cite?
New Region VIII whip Alan Grayson describes the awesome responsibility thus:
(my bold)
There are two regional whips in a region with 15 members, making the whip the point-of-contact for a whopping 6-8 members. Part of the whip’s role is acting as a messenger between members and leadership. As I posted earlier, there are a shit-ton of whips. He looks like a party leader in the same way an assistant shift manager at Taco Bell is “company management”.
FWIW, ISTM that a regional whip is a backbencher. (OTOH, I don’t think some tweet from the NRCC is that big of a deal either.)
How many regions are there? And yes, I see the position as a scaled up version of a lead worker at Taco Bell. Or maybe their burrito specialist.
There are 12 regions. See the information I posted earlier: http://democrats.rules.house.gov/archives/rs20499.pdf
Anyway, Johnson is no longer the whip for that region. The current whips for that region appear to be Alan Grayson and Terri Sewell. I say “appear to be” because I can’t find a list of all the whips anywhere, presumably because no one gives a flying fuck who the low-level whips are. I assume Johnson lost his whip-ship because he is the kind of guy who thinks an island might tip over, and the other members of his region voted for someone else.
And any-anyway, this has fuck all to do with the trillion dollar coin.
Wouldn’t a coin that big be enough to sink the Titanic?
That’s certainly easy to say, isn’t it? Give evidence, please.
You’re right, I was ignorant of objections that, to the best of my knowledge, hadn’t been raised yet. Golly gee. :rolleyes:
Maybe you don’t understand what ‘ad hominem’ means. Please explain which variety of the ad hominem fallacy I used.
Seems like a relevant fact to me.
Now the actual purpose of the platinum coin law was to raise money for the U.S. treasury by selling commemorative coins. The law would have obviously failed in its purpose if the $50, $100, $500 platinum coins had to have $50, $100, $500 worth of platinum. And I hope you’re not saying that the law says the $500 platinum coin would have had to be ten times as big as the $50 coin.
Except it’s what you are saying - or at least saying is a real possibility.
Well, he’s a heavy hitter in the legal world. So when he says that an interpretation of a law about coins that appears ridiculous based on everything we know about coins in general, commemorative coins in particular, and the purpose of the law itself really IS ridiculous, I’m inclined to take him at his word.
It does when that’s the whole point of producing commemorative coins. Dumbass.
You’re right, he wouldn’t have been a smart enough guy to think of what other sections of the law might’ve interacted with that particular section. I’m sure he’s just a detail guy, the sort who’s good when you give him a very narrow, focused problem. :rolleyes:
According to whom? You. Now you have proven yourself wrong.
Yeppers. And I don’t see any evidence that either the NRCC or, later, Fox News, was relying on a detailed analysis of the law, but simply being stupid.
If they get lucky and there’s some section of the law that says that, for platinum coins, unlike any other conventional or commemorative coins, the face value of the coin has to be approximately the value of the metal in the coin, it doesn’t make them any smarter. It’s like guessing the right answer on the math test, rather than working it out. You’re still just as stupid.
Nah, I don’t think it would float, so it wouldn’t be a menace to navigation like an iceberg. 