I was reading debate docs today for reasons that I honestly can’t explain and came across a team that said that United States should mint a trillion-dollar coin™️ and I’ve been thinking about that.
You would think that minting that kind of thing, especially in bulk, would crash the US economy and massively inflate the dollar to a substantial degree if you used them to pay off the national debt or just spend, but I’ve been thinking about it, and I feel like that just wouldn’t happen. Think about it …
You’ve got a one trillion-dollar coin, who are you gonna give it to? The only real actor that could even accept a payment that large is social security and if you want that debt paid off you could just forgive it and print money for benefits. Other than that, you don’t really have any actor that can take the coin. What that means is that you’re left with giving someone this coin and then saying, “and I’ll need 200 billion dollars in change.” That’s approximately 10% of literally all of the US currency in circulation that the actor is going to need to cough up to get the coin, and then, they’re in the exact same pickle.
Plus, given this is the situation, who in their right mind, even if you had the spare cash lying around to provide the change, would accept this offer? Suddenly, you need to find something that you can buy for a trillion dollars and or another actor in the world that somehow controls a sufficiently absurd quantity of currency to give you change as well.
That’s not even getting to bigger issue, namely, where do you put it? You need to make sure that it’s in a place where it cannot be lost. You’re not really worried about it being stolen, given the one-of-a-kind nature of the thing and the aforementioned problem with it being unusable at full value, but it also isn’t like you can get that deposit insured at full value by the FDIC. Really, the plan ought to be to bury it on a desert island or send it to an easily accessible satellite, far away from fire, flood, and tornado risks.
Again though, what are you meant to do with the forsaken thing? Who would want it? Who would accept it as payment? Who would be on it? (for the answer to that question, I would nominate the Monopoly Man, but that’s the topic of an entirely different arbitrary rant tacked on to the end of daily poem).