Paul Krugman and the trillion dollar coin

In this column Paul is asking what all the fuss is over the trillion dollar coin idea. For those not familiar with this, it is basically to get the treasury to mint a coin with a face value of 1 trillion dollars. Once minted, the coin would be deposited with the fed and presto, an extra trillion to spend!

I am no nobel prize winner like Paul so I do not have his keen credentials to lend my opinion the same weight as his but I will present mine anyway.

Paul, you should immediately give back your Nobel prize. The fact that you are even entertaining this idea as an option should disqualify you from your current prize and cause the loss of all of your degrees as well.

A 12 year old knows this is nothing but a gimmick yet you treat it as a serious option.

I understand that this plan (to have an instant trillion dollars created out of nothing but about an ounce of metal) is simply a much shorter and quicker version of what the fed is currently doing (running the printing presses 24/7 and cranking out the green backs) as well as the decades long government raid on the SS fund (where the majority of the money is simply IOUs) . So please explain to me how doing this would that not have inflationary affects, further debasing our currency? Either inflation will rise or this "coin" is really a loan and the money will need to be paid back. You have to pick one or the other. It is not like treasury will, as part of minting this coin crap out 1 trillion in gold to back it up. It is backed by air and nothing more, just like most of our existing currency.

If this is such a great idea, why not go all in? Mint 20 or 30 of them. Bingo, you have not only paid off the current national debt but also given the country a surplus so Obama and congress can carry on with their spending ways!

While you are at it, might as well set the income tax rate to 0. You have just as much of a chance of paying off all of this current and future government debt (which is zero in case you are having trouble keeping up) with income tax rates at current levels, zero or even 100%. So you might as well let the sheep feel grateful before the whole place comes crashing down.

It is amazing that those that hold themselves up as "our" intellectual betters would rather champion ideas such as this instead of being the adults in the room and push for the real spending and entitlement reforms that are needed in order to get our fiscal house in order. We are bankrupting our kids, grandkids and great grandkids and instead of trying to get things under control Paul and others want to just keep the party going for a little longer.