Scott Fullwiler. Joe Firestone

It's hard to listen to the doomsday rhetoric of Austerians like Paul Ryan and intermittently the less hysterical, but equally mythical narratives of the President when he talks about deficit/debt reduction, when you know better; when you know that both are talking about a bogeyman that doesn't exist. Here's Ryan, the Republican wunderkind:

“We face a crushing burden of debt. The debt will soon eclipse our entire economy, and grow to catastrophic levels in the years ahead.”

Read below the fold...

How can the President win a victory for the people in the coming hostage-taking over the budget? Here's a scenario!

1. Mint a platinum coin with face value big enough to cover pay-off of the national debt, and the gap between tax revenues and Government spending for many years to come. For example, $60 Trillion in face value would generate enough electronic credits in the Treasury General Account (TGA) at the Fed to last for about 20 years or through 2030. Result: $60 Trillion in the TGA, none of it spent, so no possibility of inflation. Read below the fold...

Now that a debt ceiling deal has ended the immediate crisis, the attention being given to the President's options, in case there was no deal on the debt, will fade into the background, and most of the options offered to get past the debt ceiling won't be discussed again, until the next time there's a “debt ceiling crisis.” In highlighting, in previous posts, the President's option of using Proof Platinum Coin Seigniorage (PPCS) to pay back part or all of the national debt, other bloggers and myself writing about PPCS, have raised broader questions of whether the President should use it to:

-- 1) pay back the national debt entirely, Read below the fold...

By

Scott Fullwiler

(X-posted with permission of the author and New Economic Perspectives)

(Editor's note:I think this is the definitive post on how proof platinum coin seigniorage relates to inflation. So, I've now stickied it!) Read below the fold...