This is the part that really caught me off guard in the opinion. Folks rightly focus on, well, the top-line. But this is just a complete misunderstanding of executive privilege or where it comes from, and is patently, grossly invented for one man and for one case
Everybody makes jokes about ordering drone strikes on Mar-a-Lago, etc. which is obviously insane.
But Biden should be using the ruling to "fire a shot across the bow" on some policy matters, if only to highlight the extent of SCOTUS' partisan corruption.
I think it would be hilarious if he had the 6 conservative SCOTUS justices’ catalytic converters stolen, refined, and minted into a coin that erased a significant fraction of the national debt.
It doesn’t work—part of the problem with a creative solution is that the legal uncertainty itself would have calamitous effects, even if you’re ultimately vindicated. But don’t put anything past this court either
So my longer argument is that its value as an idea (versus, say, a 14A claim to blow past the limit) is precisely that it sidesteps the calamitous uncertainty of going past the debt ceiling by any other means
I think you can even make a pretty non-trivial argument he should do it /outside/ of a debt-ceiling fight (but as a practical matter, they never would)
It would give the justices time to try selling coin bits for $0.167 trillion and then announce how they’re accepting openly ridiculous claims of standing from persons harmed by having a solvent government in order to reverse Trump v. US
Folks really hate the "mint the coin" stuff because it feels like (and involves) a gimmick, but the basic observation underpinning it is actually very smart and quite profound: at the fiscal level, seigniorage and debt are identical.
Concretely, if you have a $20 in your wallet, the government owes you $20. And, perversely enough, if the Fed has $1m in its account, the government owes itself $1m.
We’re really all just exchanging promises (made by someone else).
“Thanks for filling my gas tank, here’s a promise someone transferred to me that you can transfer to someone else, if you want”
Not clear to me where the first promise lies.
Historically, ancient beyond imagining
Conceptually, you could say that the first promise is the government's promise that you can give them some of these glorified IOUs to discharge your tax obligation
Right. The promise lies straightforwardly with the government which insists (and an insistence ultimately backed by force) in its sovereign capacity that the paper they wrote $20 on is convertible to things of $20 value
A government violating the promise means the value in the currency rapidly evaporates and the economy rapidly looking to other instruments of promised value (like foreign currency) for transactions, which is also sort of what hyperinflation fundamentally /is/
It's sort of a very weird thing because cash is stable and we're so used to the idea of thinking of buying and selling as different things, but e.g. analytically buying shares with cash /is/ also selling cash (and why the ability to buy shares and the ability to short stocks are indistinguishable)
(since under the hood you're trading contractual promises marked in one value-instrument into contractual promises marked in another in both directions)
Especially when the shilling, half-penny and farthing existed. "You owe me five farthings, say the bells of St. Martin's," but that would maddeningly also be 2-1/2 half pennies or 1-1/4 pennies. But then in Orwell's "1984" it was only three farthings so 😵💫
