Stephen Green @ Vodkapundit:
I am filled with shame for not having seen this one coming:
Paul Krugman, the liberal economist who pens a widely read column for the New York Times, on Monday joined the calls for the U.S. to mint a $1 trillion platinum coin as a way around the debt ceiling.
In case you missed it, yes, there have been calls for the Treasury to mint itself a platinum coin, stamp a one and a dozen zeroes on it, and call it money. Yes, Tim Geithner has the Constitutional authority to do so. Yes, he’d be removing a trillion dollars from productive use by the stealth tax of inflation.
To date, most of the idiots and vile progs (but I repeat myself) hopping on this particular bandwagon have been low-level blogger types. Like me, but viler and even dumber. Now they have Paul Krugman on their side, which will drum up big support in Blue States where political idiocy is what people have with their coffee every morning.
Is there an end to the madness? Absolutely there is. Probably nothing short of the economic ruin of the nation. Maybe nothing short of its political ruin, too. But, yes, there is an end to it. And if you look closely, you can see it just over the horizon.
One way I try to let people know how much $1,000,000,000,000 is, is to write it out each time. Can the high school graduates of today figure out what amount it is? I honestly doubt it.
A better way to visualize it is:
http://www.bing.com/images/search?q=what+does+one+trillion+dollars+look+like&qpvt=what+does+one+trillion+dollars+look+like&FORM=IGRE#view=detail&id=361984B3B241FBA8C71077D2326A42DC7DA74F27&selectedIndex=8
Keep in mind that they are using $100 dollar bills. They should have use $1 bills.
For you mathematicians, I would like to know how much cubic space $1,000,000,000,000 in $1 bills would take up. Then, figure out how high the pile would be if it were piled in Rhode Island, or choose any state you want.
I didn’t comment on this because I thought at first that it was just fringe lunacy by people who just don’t have a clue. But Krugman? Sure, the guy is a Keynesian-progressive dolt, but surely he would understand the inherent negatives of minting such a coin far outweigh any positives the government could possibly gain.
Now it seems as if the movement to support minting a $1 Trillion coin is gaining steam, and from people who should know better.
The biggest negative is the perception by the world that our government would be attempting to bypass it’s financial obligations, by a dirty trick no less. The worldwide shedding of holdings of the US Dollar would be fast and massive, resulting in the devaluation of the dollar to unprecedented levels. You think that $4 gallon of gas is expensive, try $10 per gallon or more. The millionaires in the country would rapidly become the new “middle class”, shifting most of the 99%ers to below poverty levels.
Think this cannot happen? China holds $1.7 Trillion of our public debt. Other countries hold values that combined with China’s holdings, total over 50% of the public debt, or dollar, that the government is accountable for. When those dollars are flooded back into the market place, by the shedding of dollar holdings that is sure to happen, the value of the dollar will plummet. Dramatically so, in fact.
Stupid, stupid idea. And I thought the QE program of the fed reserve was irresponsible. Silly me.
@Smorgasbord:
A $1 bill is 6.1″x2.6″x.0043″. $1 is .068198″ cubic inches. $1 Million in one dollar bills, therefore, is 68,198 cubic inches, or, 39.47 cubic feet.
$1 Trillion in one dollar bills would be one million of those, so, 39,470,000 cubic feet.
There are 5,280 feet in a mile, so, if you stacked 1 cubic foot boxes side by side, to cover a 1 square mile area, you would need 27,878,400 1 cubic foot boxes. That leaves 11,591,600 boxes. If broken down and extrapolated out to cover that 1 square mile area, those remaining boxes would be reduced to standing just under 5″ tall.
So, $1 Trillion in one dollar bills would be 1 mile wide by 1 mile long, and stand 41 inches tall.
Quite incredible, if you think about it. That’s a lot of paper.