Coin collectors will have to settle for fake copies of this one if our Treasury Department goes ahead with their latest idea. They’re talking about minting a $1 trillion coin to pay our debts with. It’s legal, they have the right to do it, and the idea came up first in 2011 during the argument over raising our debt ceiling. While the coins probably won’t be made this year or the next, I bet they eventually will be. Most of our debt is owed to ourselves, and even though the coins must be made of platinum, they would be Monopoly money compared to their valuations.
I’m sort of for it, as the debt will never be paid at all by normal dollars, and it makes more sense to pay it off any way possible than to keep piling up a debt on our grandkids heads. I mean, would you rather owe the government $60,000, or no dollars? This is basically like waving away the Debt with a magic wand with money created out of thin air and a small amount of platinum instead of with real dollars collected by our government as legitimate revenue, and by dramatically reducing our debt ceiling in this artificial manner, the way is opened to increase it again by actual borrowing of real dollars from foreign lenders.
It also means that the money owed to us that was taken out of (“borrowed from”) our various mandated retirement would never be repaid, ever, but what the Hell, we all know it won’t be anyway. I think the biggest reason the Feds went after the Mafia union bosses for ripping off member’s retirement funds is that the Feds wanted to be the only ones allowed to do that.
If they do get around to stamping out some of these trillion-dollar coins, I wonder where they’ll be stored and who will be in charge of them, and I suspect they’ll be subject to being “borrowed” as well. Who knows, the road to our oblivion could well be paved with platinum.
Will Congress Critters get a complimentary $1 trillion coin?