Oct 17 JDN 2459505

Krugman thinks we should Mint The Coin: Mint a $1 trillion platinum coin and then deposit it at the Federal Reserve, thus creating, by fiat, the money to pay for the current budget without increasing the national debt.

This sounds pretty stupid. Quite frankly, it is stupid. But sometimes stupid problems require stupid solutions. And the debt ceiling is an incredibly stupid problem.

Let’s be clear about this: Congress already passed the budget. They had a right to vote it down—that is indeed their Constitutional responsibility. But they passed it. And now that the budget is passed, including all its various changes to taxes and spending, it necessarily requires a certain amount of debt increase to make it work.

There’s really no reason to have a debt ceiling at all. This is an arbitrary self-imposed credit constraint on the US government, which is probably the single institution in the world that least needs to worry about credit constraints. The US is currently borrowing at extremely low interest rates, and has never defaulted in 200 years. There is no reason it should be worrying about taking on additional debt, especially when it is being used to pay for important long-term investments such as infrastructure and education.

But if we’re going to have a debt ceiling, it should be a simple formality. Congress does the calculation to see how much debt will be needed, and if it accepts that amount, passes the budget and raises the debt ceiling as necessary. If for whatever reason they don’t want to incur the additional debt, they should make changes to the budget accordingly—not pass the budget and then act shocked when they need to raise the debt ceiling.

In fact, there is a pretty good case to be made that the debt ceiling is a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment, which states in Section 4: “The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.” This was originally intended to ensure the validity of Civil War debt, but it has been interpreted by the Supreme Court to mean that all US public debt legally incurred is valid and thus render the debt ceiling un-Constitutional.

Of course, actually sending it to the Supreme Court would take a long time—too long to avoid turmoil in financial markets if the debt ceiling is not raised. So perhaps Krugman is right: Perhaps it’s time to Mint The Coin and fight stupid with stupid.