It is fiat currency in name also. The USD isn’t backed by anything other than the fact that it’s due as taxes every year. Nobody will be spending this coin and the materials are only relevant in that they are allowed by law to be used to mint a coin of any value.
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Good for one gallon of 2050 gas
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The Trillion Dollar Coin is a horrible idea and would absolutely be abused going forward.
While I get the question on whether we should do it, I kind of file it next to the “pack the court with 25 liberal supreme court justices.” It’s a good plan, until we’re not in power anymore, and they pack it with 26 conservative supreme court justices. Then we have to pack it with 27 MORE liberal justices, and they would have to put 28 conservative judges and now the supreme court is suddenly 400 judges appointed for life.
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Define how you would abuse the ability to ignore the debt ceiling going forward. I think it’s a great step in the right direction for the US.
The idea of the debt ceiling is really dumb and the reasoning behind it comes down to playing gotcha politics.
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How? It really can’t be used for anything other than avoiding the debt ceiling which is a stupid pointless limit. The executive branch is already not allowed to spend money except as authorized by congress.
The trillion dollar coin is a dumb idea in the sense that it is a solution to a dumb problem created for political motivation. The better answer would be to simply declare that the debt ceiling doesn’t exist, which is somewhat questionable but also an option.
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Do you know how many catalytic converters the government would have to steal to mint that coin?
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Sure.
Donald Trump issues a ten trillion dollar coin and keeps it. Claims executive priv.
Donald Trump issues a ten trillion dollar coin, congress divides it up amongst people, and it’s just given to fans of the state.
The last administration literally did tons of things that congress shouldn’t have allowed them to do and there was no check on it. It literally happened not even two years ago. You don’t see a potential for misuse when / if you give the biggest egomaniac ever the ability to create an unbounded amount of cash?
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See above, but the short answer is the executive branch is checked by the congress and not two years ago congress proved unwilling to do that.
What do you think Donald Trump would do with a 10 trillion dollar coin.
No other country has the “debt ceiling” nonsense embedded in its laws.
Instead, the situation is treated as the accounting identity that it is. You legislate for spending of X, for taxation of Y and if Y is less than X, they are deemed to have approved the issuing of bonds to cover the rest. Because nobody expects any government to have perfect foresight and be able to balance tax, spending, and borrowing beforehand.
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Why is that any different than him just ordering the treasury to cut him a check for $10T? Or issue him a trillion dollars in treasury bonds that they could print before the debt ceiling limit was passed?
I don’t doubt that trump can and did steal all the money he could. But I don’t see how minting a $1T coin does any of that. The coin would be property of the US government, and if he could give it to himself he could give himself the deed to 1600 Pennsylvania avenue just as well.
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DT was put in charge of the largest military and economy on the planet. I think that mistake outweighs anything to do with this topic and would do so again. You put a person like that in charge and all bets are off.
I think that dealing with this stupid issue here and now is what needs to happen because it is standing in the way of running the country in the best interests of the people.
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Logically, you just defeated your own assertions. If a GOP bad actor ignores congress and the judiciary, then precedent is irrelevant.
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Maximize that seignorage!
Note that copper pennies aren’t profitable.
Platinum coins are already explicitly permitted in US law - ones made of other metals are not - so they don’t need to change the law to strike a perfectly legal trillion dollar coin.
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Sounds like you’ve just reinvented the House of Lords - 800+ of them at the last count.
Mint the coin–but put Trump’s face on it, and watch all Republican opposition magically vanish.
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And it’s worse than that. Because, can you imagine , a supreme court with 30 justices. Just 30…
You appeal a decision to the supreme court through the emergency docket. It first has to go to the three justices for your region who hold a hearing (because no longer is this a one person decision), and they vote 2-1 to advance it to the supreme court emergency docket for consideration. Then, 30 justices vote on hearing it, and 14 vote yes, 16 vote no. Your case drops off the emergency docket, but 7 of the justices wrote comments about bringing it up in normal conference.
As drawn out as everything is with nine justices now, it’ll be MUCH worse with 30, or 70… or however high this arms race goes. Which is the exact same answer with the trillion dollar coin. Sure, it’s a few trillion now, but could be more, and more, and more later… and none of it solves the problem, it just becomes another presidential tool to get around congressional oversight.
And call the Guinness Book people - you’ve got a shoe-in for the World’s Most Valuable Urinal Cake!
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@DukeTrout said it in a different way, but nothing stops the gop from doing that anyway. it’s just they haven’t needed to in order to get what they want.
the reason you do this stuff like this now is to shore up things like voting rights to stop the gop from undemocratic shenanigans in general.
if they’re doing it to score political points then one big failure of the dems right now is to communicate that the debt is the republican’s fault.
they’re putting their spending bills after the debt limit to indicate the two aren’t connected, but it’s like they forgot to actually make it one of their talking points
coronavirus and the trump era tax cuts. those are the only two reasons the debt limit needs to be raised. ( and largely reagan and the bushes are responsible for the rest. meanwhile, clinton balanced the budget, and obama got close despite the inherited dumpster fire of an economy )
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I guess I’m not sure what you think the problem is. In my mind the problem is a cap on the “debt” which is only a way of saying that there is a cap on how much money the government has spent but not taxed away - big deal.
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