Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff
dada wrote:Maybe he gets into it, explains his logic, shows his work.
Administering Money: Coinage, Debt Crises, and the Future of Fiscal Policy
Cornell Legal Studies Research Paper Forthcoming
74 Pages Posted: 2 Oct 2020
Rohan Grey
Cornell University, Law School; Binzagr Institute for Sustainable Prosperity
Date Written: February 11, 2020
Abstract
The power to coin money is a fundamental constitutional power and central element of fiscal policymaking, along with spending, taxing, and borrowing. However, it remains neglected in constitutional and administrative law, despite the fact that money creation has been central to the United States’ fiscal capacities and constraints since at least 1973, when it abandoned convertibility of the dollar into gold. This neglect is particularly prevalent in the context of debt ceiling crises, which emerge when Congress fails to grant the executive sufficient borrowing authority to finance spending in excess of taxes. In such instances, prominent legal and economic scholars have argued that the President should choose the “least unconstitutional option” of breaching the debt ceiling, rather than impeding on Congress’s even more fundamental powers to tax and spend. However, this view fails to consider a fourth, arguably more constitutional option: minting a high value coin under an obscure provision of the Coinage Act, and using the proceeds to circumvent the debt ceiling entirely. Reintroducing coinage into our fiscal discourse raises novel and interesting questions about the broader nature of, and relationship between “money” and “debt.” It also underscores how legal debates over fiscal policy implicate broader social myths about money. As we enter the era of digital currency, creative legal solutions like high value coinage have the potential to serve as imaginative catalysts that enable us to collectively develop new monetary myths that better fit our modern context and needs.
Keywords: administrative law, constitutional law, law of money, macroeconomics, monetary theory, federal budget policy, public finance
Suggested Citation:
DrEvil wrote:Kinda hard to get change.
Agent Orange Cooper wrote:Why not mint a quadrillion dollar coin?
Jon Stewart’s quip that “if we're just gonna make sh*t up,
I say go big or go home. How about a $20 trillion dollar coin?”258 is revealing,
in that it demonstrates how the sheer size of a number as large
as $1 trillion can be so psychologically disruptive as to break any residual
subconscious linkage between the nominal face value of coins and
their underlying metallic content.
Instead, the prospect of minting a “trillion dollar coin” confronts the
public directly with the reality of the “big monetary infinity sign in the
sky,”259 and in doing so, forces us to collectively grapple with the economic
and cultural implications of the state’s money creation power. For
professional clowns like Stewart, that confrontation may, as Buchanan
observes, represent little more than an opportunity to “expose the fundamentally
unreal nature of money to public ridicule.”260 But for other,
more thoughtful, segments of the population, it represents an opportunity
to imaginatively reclaim the public fisc from the austere clutches of red
ink, overburdened grandchildren, bond vigilantes, and empty coffers.
Reintroducing coinage into our fiscal discourse raises novel and interesting questions about the broader nature of, and relationship between “money” and “debt.” It also underscores how legal debates over fiscal policy implicate broader social myths about money. As we enter the era of digital currency, creative legal solutions like high value coinage have the potential to serve as imaginative catalysts that enable us to collectively develop new monetary myths that better fit our modern context and needs.
Belligerent Savant » Fri Feb 12, 2021 12:02 pm wrote:.
Yes, because they've done such a good job at it, historically, eh? Well, for a (increasingly smaller) minority, such management has worked out well.
Belligerent Savant » Fri Feb 12, 2021 12:31 pm wrote:.
Outside the earnest policy-makers involved, what's the net result for the majority (particularly the labor/working classes) to this point?
Doesn't look good, but perhaps that's a separate topic.
dada wrote:So let's say I'm building a house. I have a warehouse full of wood, but I can't build until I get my allotment of inches to measure it with.
The situation is absurd, clearly. To conclude that the answer to my problem is to make more inches is already one level down the absurd gopherhole.
Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 47 guests