Last Thursday, a new whitehouse.gov petition urged President Obama to mint a trillion-dollar coin to avoid the next debt crisis:
With the creation and Treasury deposit of a new platinum coin with a value of $1 trillion US Dollars, we would avert the absurd-yet-imminent debt ceiling faceoff in Congress in two quick and simple steps! While this may seem like an unnecessarily extreme measure, it is no more absurd than playing political football with the US — and global — economy at stake.
This is an idea that started circulating on blogs and there’s no evidence that President Obama is considering it at all. But lots of people are taking the idea seriously, and a Republican congressman from Oregon says he’s going to introduce a bill to make the trillion-dollar coin illegal. But the more Republicans push against the trillion-dollar coin, the more Democrats will want to embrace it; the coin is going to be a major conversation piece for the next few weeks. Where does Blogtown stand on it?
You wouldn’t want to get the public actually thinking about what is underlying all of our money (hint: nothing).
If they watch the Treasury invent a trillion dollars out of thin air simply by stamping it on a piece of metal, they might start thinking about the real underlying value of that piece of paper in the wallet with a “100” stamped on it. Or all of those 1’s and 0’s in your bank’s computer that they assure you are worth something.
A monetary instrument is useless if they can’t make change for it at Burger King.
SIMPSONS DID IT