pw!

PW!

I would pay money to see Geithner or Summers in a clown suit. I will see you Fluffy white couch dogs and raise you Smoke in pants.

By the way, Laurence Tribe came out in favor of the legality of the Platinum Coin Option back in 2011:

Here is another option: the Treasury could mint coins to cover all the nation’s spending commitments. As Jack Balkin has pointed out, 31 U.S.C. § 5112(k) authorizes the Treasury to mint platinum coins in any denomination. Balkin suggests that the President could exercise this authority to mint a couple of trillion-dollar coins. By doing so, the President could put an end to the problem created when the Treasury’s revenues are insufficient to meet its spending commitments, without violating any existing federal law. If we accept Balkin’s interpretation of the relevant statutory provision, the central premise of Professor Buchanan’s argument—that default is guaranteed to occur under extant statutes come August 3—isn’t even true to begin with.

Of course, raising the debt ceiling might be a wiser move from a policy standpoint than simply printing more money or issuing new forms of currency. But this is not a constitutional distinction on which Professor Buchanan is entitled to rely in order to pronounce the debt ceiling unconstitutional, while leaving the ceiling on outstanding currency notes—and other elements of our revenue-raising arrangements—intact.

And this week he’s reiterated and expanded upon his 2011 comments:

I don’t think it makes sense to think about this as some sort of “loophole” issue. Using the statute this way doesn’t entail exploiting a loophole; it entails just reading the plain language that Congress used. The statute clearly does authorize the issuance of trillion-dollar coins. First, the statute itself doesn’t set any limit on coin value. Second, other clauses of 31 USC §5112 do set such limits, but §5112(k)—dealing with platinum coins—does not. So expressio unius strengthens the inference that there isn’t any limit here.

Of course, Congress probably didn’t have trillion-dollar coins in mind, but there’s no textual or other legal basis for importing this probable intention into the statute. What 535 people might have had in their collective “mind” just can’t control the meaning of a law this clear.

It’s also quite clear that the minting of such a coin couldn’t be challenged; I don’t see who would have standing.

Bottom line: This is a situation where the political and economic considerations, not the legal considerations, have to drive the decision-making about this option. It’s certainly a lot better from just about every perspective than having the nation stuck on either horn of the very real dilemma you outlined below, which I agree offers no plausible way out as long as enough leaders in Congress insist on playing Russian Roulette with our economy and risking our full faith and credit by using the debt ceiling as a bargaining chip as they are threatening to do.

DrDICK!

RE: Smoke — Awww! She needs some ear skritches.

Greetings!

She gets lots of those.

SUZ!

EDP! Howdy!

Such a pretty cat, she is.

Timmy is already a clown. what more do you need?

How-DEE! (This Minnie Pearl moment was brought to you by no one particular.)

Restitution?

How about revenge?

Banksters’ heads on pikes on Wall Street?

Hello! I’d much rather imagine Timmeh in a prison jumpsuit.

If Ben Bernanke can issue 15 to 16 trillions of dollars of loans to his banking buddies around the world, then turn to the interviewer from “Sixty Minutes” and declare that this isn’t even a big deal, as it doesn’t even obligate the tax payer. It’s not real money, he explained – it’s his digitized creations!

So Obama only needs to create some huge digital piggy bank that could receive a new set of trillion dollar loans, and then let Bernanke have at it one more time.

Any of em in a jump suit.

And we have a problem with the debt limit. Imagine that?

I just wish they still had the ball and chain.

We are about to get a timmeh copy: Jack Lew.

Nah, I’m too squeamish. Let’s just throw ‘em in jail and forget about ‘em.

I’ll take it back. Lew is more of an Erskine Bowles kind of guy, cut it out.

Don’t remind me.

I keep telling folks that Obama spent too long at the U of Chicago. His head got filled with the Friedmanite Dogma. He has been a deficit hawk since he entered the Senate.

Here you go: Minnie Pearl

I was hoping that he would have at least been made to change his ways if not his views, such as what happened to FDR — who was always a deficit hawk at heart, and his backsliding on this in 1936 is why we needed World War II to get us all the way out of the Great Depression.

But then again, back in the 1930s we not only had powerful unions, but powerful Socialist and Communist parties to put serious pressure on Roosevelt. Neither exists today.

Personally, I believe Obama would have called himself a Republican if A) he had come up in politics somewhere other than Chicago and B) the Republican party was still sane, (and not racist)

Probably. His policies are pretty much Ford/Nixon in most areas.

I have not formed a strong opinion on Lew. His background seems a bit more varied than one might expect.

I found this interesting.

Lew attended Carleton College in Minnesota where his faculty adviser was Paul Wellstone,

Yeah. Pretty much right down the middle.

(Okay, since it’s likely somebody is going to jump on that, I should explain that “right down the middle” in this case means representative of Nixon/Ford.)

Sort of old school Rockefeller Republican. Economically conservative, mildly hawkish on defense and foreign policy, and socially somewhat liberal.

Yep. Just that.

Gotta go to bed. Oya.

Night! Think I will follow suit and toddle off as well. Take care all.

Disagree. I don’t see O as even remotely socially liberal. JMO of course but see no evidence of that. Plus he’s a big War hawk. Again JMO.

Forgeddabour bringing in the clowns. I just want to see most politicians, the bankers & Wall St doing a coordinated group perp walk. I can however dream on….

A clown suit on Geithner would be a redundancy–and the same is beginning to be true of Krugman.

If $1T platinum coins get minted, what are the odds that one of them winds up in a Salvation Army kettle this December?

G’night!

G’night, DD!

I’m off for Bedfordshire as well.

We also had manufacturing in the U.S. and greater control over the economy within our borders.

And no bailout.

And, in those days, wars helped the economy. For some reason, they seem to do the opposite now.

More likely Goldman Sachs.

Or, at the very least, the Vatican.

The Salvation Army is so soup kitchen, thrift store and overall down market, doncha know. The Vatican on the other hand, would understand something like a $2,000 executive wastebasket and custom made Prada footwear. Experienced with money laundering, too.

Both Nixon and Ford were to Obama’s left, IMO.

Nixon’s health care plan certainly was to left of the Heritage Foundation plan (aka Hillarycare, aka Romneycare, aka Obamacare).

Nixon signed a lot of good, new laws, too.

Not at all. Nelson Rockefeller was definitely more liberal than Obama is.

Obama said that he would have been seen as a modern Republican in the 1980s. That’s Reagan, the darling and icon of Republican conservatives to this day. Reagan was to the right of all the other Republicans you have mentioned, Rockefeller, Nixon and Ford.

During the 2008 primaries, both Hillary and Barack had Reagan on their list of the ten greatest Presidents of all time. And Reagan, not Bush 41, was also Dummya’s role model for a successful Presidency.

New Democrat=Reagan Republican. The DLC formed formally as a response to Reagan’s electoral success, especially in his stunning re-election, and especially in his appeal to members of the other major Party (“Reagan Democrats”). That is what the Democrat Party has offered us since Reagan, namely, more Reagan administrations.

I think Little Timmy ought to barge in shirtless, wearing a pair of ass-chaps, a red bow-tie, and lavender high-heeled suede boots.

Obama wouldn’t take a way out of the Republican hostage taking cycle if you gave it to him without any unseemly gimmickry (the platinum clownsuit) or any is-it-Constitutional? controversy. As a disciple of Reagan-Thatcher Neoliberalism and a Bipartisan hostile to the 99%, he welcomes the “discipline” of Republican debt hawkery. He wants to impose painful austerity cuts on the Democrats’ centerpiece programs and on their constituencies, who no doubt are stupid, lazy deadwood in his eyes. Unfortunately for him and for us, that Reaganite zeal for punitive austerity is simply lethal for an economy as weakened and fragile as ours is now. He has probably been warned about that, if only from the voices like Krugman’s which faintly float over the hedge at the White House now and then. But he “knows” he can only be a great unifying leader, like Lincoln, like Reagan, in the dead eyes of David Broder and his own, if he forces his own party to make peace on terms that are most generous to the defeated opposition. Oh dear. Duty is at war with inclination! What to do, Barry?

The reason wars helped the economy is that we actually taxed our rich people so that they would pay for them. Until George W. Bush came along, we had never, ever cut taxes during a war — we raised them, so we could pay for the war.