Skip to main content

The Trillion-Dollar Coin

Image
By
It started as a campaign gimmick.  Obscure presidential candidate Bo Gritz came up with it in 1992, during his second White House run.  Gritz never got very far, but his followers were passionate.  And yes, that was his real name: James Gordon “Bo” Gritz.

Gritz ran under two different slogans: “Save the stars and stripes!” and “God, guns and Gritz!”  He was known for courting conspiracy theorists, hoping to win converts from both the extreme right and the extreme left to his cause.  And what was his cause?  He had three major planks in his platform: a closed border with Mexico, re-segregation of the races in America, and the abolition of the Federal Reserve.  As you might imagine, Mr. Gritz was not exactly a mainstream candidate.

Two of his policy ideas—the closing of the border with Mexico and the abolition of the Federal Reserve—have managed to gain traction in the modern Republican Party.  One of Gritz’ big issues was the national debt, which he believed the Federal Reserve was at least partly responsible for.  He had the idea that if the United States government could mint a single, trillion-dollar coin, it could send it to the Federal Reserve and immediately pay off the entire national debt.  (Where Mr. Gritz thought the government could get a trillion dollars without going further into debt is something I cannot find any explanation for.)  Gritz would sometimes hold up a single coin during his speeches as a prop, as if to suggest how easy it would be for his plan to work.

As it happened, Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton won that race, pulling in 44,909,806 votes.  Gritz only got 106,152, putting him in fifth place for the popular vote, and tying for third place in the electoral vote, with zero.  This would be Mr. Gritz’ last presidential run (to date), but he remains active in politics.  To date, none of the ideas he advocated for have been put into place.  One of them, however, did see a revision.

In 2011, Congress was embroiled in a disagreement with the White House over the debt ceiling.  The debt ceiling is the limit that the American national debt can reach, and every couple of years, Congress will raise it.  It has to, because Congress, having already spent the money, needs to pay for what they’ve spent.  Not paying it is kind of like ignoring your credit card bills, except in this case, instead of getting turned away during your next shopping spree at Nordstrom’s, the entire U.S. government ceases to function after a month or two.

To deal with this looming crisis brought on by an inability of Washington to reach a consensus, a suggestion was made by lawyer Carlos Mucha, who posted online under the moniker Beowulf.  Beowulf started pushing the idea that a trillion-dollar coin could be minted by the Treasury Department in order to cover the debt ceiling, and do an end-run around the mess on Capitol Hill.  Strangely, the idea gained traction.  When the Yale Law School caught wind of this idea, they started to promote it, but when Congress and the president managed to work out a solution to the 2011 debt ceiling crisis, interest evaporated.

However, the debt ceiling needed to be raised once again in 2013, and the same entrenched differences took hold.  This time, economist Paul Krugman started to promote the trillion-dollar coin.  Wonks pointed out that the Treasury is allowed to mint platinum coins for whatever reason it might deem fit, and that it does do this on occasion.  Since there is no upper limit on these coins… why not a trillion?

Image result for bo gritzImage result for john boehnerRelated image
From left to right: Mr. "Bo" Gritz, Rep. John Boehner (R-OH), Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY).
Speaker John Boehner dismissed the idea, comparing it to an old Simpsons episode in which Homer goes looking for his lost trillion-dollar bill. The House tried to close the loophole that allowed Treasury to strike platinum coins, but this met with the opposition of Rep. Jerrold Nadler. The House didn’t push back, because it was clear that the Senate wouldn’t allow the platinum law to be abolished. The idea was that if the trillion-dollar coin were minted, it could exist as another trillion dollars on the Treasury Department’s balance sheet until the debt ceiling were raised, after which the coin could be melted down, because that’s a lot of money to leave lying around in loose change. In the end, the 2013 debt ceiling crisis did result in the government being shut down for a while, which raised American debt further. The debt ceiling was eventually raised, and no trillion-dollar coin has ever been minted. Yet.

 —Kurt Kaletka

Image result for trillion dollar coin
Labels:

Comments

Moneymastersdocumentary said…
This comment has been removed by the author.
Wednesday, August 22, 2018 at 11:02:00 AM EDT
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How the Lemon was Invented

By
Lemons How do you make a lemon?  Silly question, isn’t it?  You just take the seeds out of one and plant them, and wait for the tree to come up, right?  That’s true, but it hasn’t always been that easy.  Lemons today are a widely cultivated citrus fruit, with a flavor used in cuisines of countries where no lemon tree would ever grow.  You might think that it was just a matter of ancient peoples finding the trees, enjoying their fruit and growing more of them, but that’s not true.  The lemon is a human invention that’s maybe only a few thousand years old. The first lemons came from East Asia, possibly southern China or Burma.  (These days, some prefer to refer to Burma as Myanmar .  I’ll try to stay out of that controversy here and stick to fruit.)  The exact date of the lemon’s first cultivation is not known, but scientists figure it’s been around for more than 4,000 years.  The lemon is a cross breed of several fruits.  One f...
6 comments
Read more

Origins of the Word Hoser, eh?

By
Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas as cultural icons Bob and Doug McKenzie These days we often hear Canadians referred to as “Hosers”.  It’s a strange word, and it sounds a little insulting, but it’s sometimes used more with affection than malice.  Any such word is difficult to use correctly, especially if you don’t belong to the group the word describes.   I can’t say I feel comfortable throwing the word around, myself, but I can offer a little information about it that might shed some light on what it means. First off: is it an insult?  Yes… and no.   The word hoser can be used as an insult or as a term of endearment; the variation hosehead , is certainly an insult.  It’s a mild insult, meaning something like jerk or idiot or loser .  Its origin is unclear, and there are several debatable etymologies of the word.  One claims that it comes from the days before the zamboni was invented, when the losing team of an outdoor ice hockey game...
1 comment
Read more

The Whoopie Cap

By
What can you do with your father’s old hats?  If you were born after, say, 1955, the answer is probably “Not much.”  Men were still wearing fedoras in the 1970s and 1980s, but by 1990, fashion had turned to the point where unless you were Indiana Jones, the hat didn’t look right.  Some blame Jack Kennedy for starting it all, strutting around perfectly coiffed and bare-headed in the early 1960s.  In 1953, Harry Truman, a haberdasher by trade, stepped out of office, and just eight years later we had a president who didn’t care for hats?  The times, they were a-changin’. If you set the WABAC machine to the 1920s or 1930s (when Indiana Jones was supposed to have lived), you would see the fedora was still very much in style.  Men just didn’t leave the house without a hat of some kind, and for what remained of the middle class, the fedora was the topper of choice.  But like any other piece of clothing, hats wear out, too.  When that happened, you’d ju...
Post a Comment
Read more