by Smitty
Finally, just consider the vileness of that G.O.P. threat. If we were to hit the debt ceiling, the U.S. government would end up defaulting on many of its obligations. This would have disastrous effects on financial markets, the economy, and our standing in the world. Yet Republicans are threatening to trigger this disaster unless they get spending cuts that they weren’t able to enact through normal, Constitutional means.
Republicans go wild at this analogy, but it’s unavoidable. This is exactly like someone walking into a crowded room, announcing that he has a bomb strapped to his chest, and threatening to set that bomb off unless his demands are met.
The only way in which Krugman could seem to be rational is if one were to accept that the Progressive Project has affected some kind of Article V re-write of our Constitution, via stare decisis, over the last century. If you accept such an oath-shattering premise as driving the pretzel logic of our Ruling Class, then, sure: the idiocy of Krugman and the rest of the Beltway Clown Car comes into focus.
Once we’ve departed the Rule of Law, and the beautiful people can get away with breaking the law on TV, because
D.C. attorney general Irvin B. Nathan announced his decision Friday afternoon by releasing a letter to an attorney for NBC. Nathan wrote that though the device Gregory held up “meets the definition” of the criminal statute, he wrote that prosecution “would not promote public safety in the District of Columbia nor serve the best interests of the people of the District to whom this office owes its trust.”
After a line of nonsense like that, why not just mint coins in Weimar German denominations?
Here’s how it would work: The Treasury would mint a platinum coin with a face value of $1 trillion (or many coins with smaller values; it doesn’t really matter). This coin would immediately be deposited at the Federal Reserve, which would credit the sum to the government’s account. And the government could then write checks against that account, continuing normal operations without issuing new debt.
The Krugmanerrand
Why bother with a denomination at all? As long as we’re punching the clown, just slap an ? symbol on the thing and declare victory. We’re a fundamentally unserious people with a fundamentally unserious government, advised by fundamentally unserious ‘eclownomists’: we deserve a fundamentally unserious currency.
via jwbrown1969