On the Platinum Coin Trick

Ace of Spades blog

Excerpts:

• There are actually three questions tied up in the platinum coin trick. Is it constitutional? Is it legal? Is it a good idea? Actually, there's a fourth question, and we'll start there: Is it even necessary?
• The answer to this fourth question, of course, is "no, it is not necessary, at least, not in the short term."
• So, is the platinum coin constitutional?...The Supreme Court has upheld broad grants of generalized authority to executive agencies for sixty years now and this is no different.
• Is the platinum coin legal?...Congress left the value of a bullion platinum coin up to the Secretary.
• Is the platinum coin a good idea?...In short, the platinum coin trick an unnecessary idea and a bad one, but it is not, as some have argued, unconstitutional or illegal.

I still say that there's no difference between doing this and raising the debt and having the Federal Reserve buy bonds with money out of thin air.

There's one difference--- eventually, they will still run out of borrowing authority.  The platinum coin trick will only kick the can down the road.  It doesn't solve any problems.

As for good or a bad idea, I think it is a good idea to use it to fund the Social Security Account.  This would set it up as independent of the budget battles.  Besides, the money has already been paid in.  That's the only way I would support the idea.

However, I have had an idea of using platinum coins to fund a moon mission for purposes of mining it for platinum.  It wouldn't take a trillion dollar coin to do that.  You could set it up the same way as with other coins and use the mined platinum to strike the coins.  That would mean about a 30 to 50 to 1 value--- in such a case as that, it could be a $80,000 coin assuming 50 to 1 and a market value of $1600.  Such a value on each coin would yield $2,560,000,000 a ton.  Those would be mined on Earth.  The ones from the moon would be worth a lot more.