I think this country is so far gone it’s going to take a miracle to get it back.

gophergirl on January 7, 2013 at 7:36 PM

There’s no going back, GG (WYAN). Seriously. It isn’t physically possible, like trying to get my family to take a picture together at Thanksgiving. Not going to happen. Respectfully suggest you let go just for sanity’s sake.

The future, though — you can reintroduce whatever you’d like, carry forward everything you can. At least, that’s the way I’m looking at it. The day’s lost. But who does tomorrow belong to? That kind of thing.

Those really are different ways of seeing it and trying to get back to sanity might drive you nuts. :)

Did this country go full retard or what?

Chuck Schick on January 7, 2013 at 7:30 PM

Can’t stop laughing at that.

I guess those sarc tags ARE needed. :(

wolly4321 on January 7, 2013 at 7:52 PM

Don’t you dare. :)

Can you imagine a president giving a prime-time, Oval Office address and saying, what we’re gonna do, people, is mint a coin worth $1 trillion. That just doesn’t pass any laugh test I can conceive of. I’d bet Obama would drop 12 points in the polls within five days of making such an announcement.

You’re giving the idiot-and-retarded vote WAAAAAAAAAAAAAY too much credit, Michael.

FDR had steel pennies and that worked out okay.

wolly4321 on January 7, 2013 at 7:46 PM

Pennies are worth one cent and not $1 trillion, and we are not in a war so bad the military needs every gram of copper it can get.

See the difference?

Which one would be worse? That alternate, or the one we’re living in now?

falcon on January 8, 2013 at 9:02 AM

So help me, I’ve mentally debated the merits of this timeline versus the events of the Red Alert series being real. Even when those events include the invasion and partial occupation of the continental United States. Because we are THAT screwed up now.

Of course, by doing that, we’ll have an alternate alternate universe where Kennedy survived and served two terms, Johnson was never elected (and the “Great Society” was never created), Watergate never happened, Gerald Ford was elected President in 1976 and re-elected in 1980, Reagan never made it into office, and the Soviet Union overran Europe and WWIII started in 1993.

Which one would be worse? That alternate, or the one we’re living in now?

And… how many troy ounces are in a troy ton?

E-R

electric-rascal on January 8, 2013 at 12:34 AM

If I remember correctly, 29,400.

I ran the numbers. The closing price of platinum today was $1,556 per ounce.
At that price, to be worth $1 trillion dollars, Obama’s coin needs to weigh just over 20 tons.
Platinum weighs 21 grams per cubic centimeter or just under one ounce per cubic centimeter.
…

Curmudgeon on January 7, 2013 at 7:48 PM

Did you figure it using troy ounces or avoirdupois ounces? Precious metals are measured in troy ounces.

And… how many troy ounces are in a troy ton?

E-R

I’d wondered if it was copper for the wire windings needed to extract the uranium for the nuclear bombs. I haven’t found evidence of that though.

Paul-Cincy on January 7, 2013 at 7:51 PM

I don’t remember the exact figure, but the percentage of US electricity production that went to power the Manhattan Project was mind-boggling. A lot of it was probably used just for transmission lines and transformers.

And even without the Manhattan Project it took a lot of copper to wire all the new tanks, trucks, ships, and every single bullet we produced for the war had full-metal jacket made of copper.

Walter Sobchak on January 7, 2013 at 8:21 PM

Actually, the electromagnetic coils needed for the Manhattan Project presented a huge problem. Copper was in very short supply due to the war effort and diverting the amount needed for the huge coils would have prompted questions. Questions nobody wanted asked given the top secret nature of the project.

The answer was to release tons of silver from the treasury stocks. Silver is also an excellent conductor of electricity (even better than copper, actually). The electromagnetic coils were constructed from silver, worked just fine, and the whole thing was done quite secretly.

a default would do the same…

nathor on January 7, 2013 at 8:24 PM

There would be no default.

Debt Service:

December 2012: $95,736,594,801.52
November 2012: $25,068,968,472.99
October 2012: $12,922,741,407.27

Total for first 3 months of FY2013: $133,728,304,681.78

($133,728,304,681.78: That would pay for 1.3 years of food stamps for 50 million Americans, just so that you have an idea how much money we are wasting on debt service. The total in FY2012 spent on servicing the debt was $359,796,008,919.49. Imagine how much it will be in 2017, when Obama leaves office and the national debt is predicted to be, at minimum, $22 trillion. Heaven help us if interest rates go up).

In FY2011, tax revenues were a little more than $2.4 trillion. In February 2012, tax revenues collected were $103.4 billion. In March 2012, tax revenues collected equaled ~$171.2. Debt service in February 2012 was $17.4 billion and in March it was $24.7 billion. The same receipts are expected, at minimum, and outlays for debt service are about the same for February and March as they were last year.

IOW, WE CANNOT DEFAULT ON THE DEBT. BY LAW, THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT MUST PAY THE DEBT SERVICE FIRST.

I say why be a piker with only a $1,000,000,000,000 coin? Why not just make it $1,000,000,000,000,000 (quadrillion) coin and we’d have a surplus for years! Or maybe to the end of the current Obama administration…maybe…

/sarc

ProfShadow on January 7, 2013 at 9:15 PM

Now that’s just a little crazy! Oh, wait. With a quadrillion, Obama could by our votes for the rest of our lives. And we can all have boats!

You know, on the NYT site this Krugman article is getting a lot of favorable comments. How idiotic can the American public be?!!

And if the voting public is so greedy and stupid, how can reason ever prevail? After all, not every tragedy leaves survivors.

Not all,, but most.

The coin REPRESENTS a value, doesn’t have that value. So it could be, oh, maybe 2 inches across with a gilded Obama profile on one side and a picture of a golf course green on the other.

I say why be a piker with only a $1,000,000,000,000 coin? Why not just make it $1,000,000,000,000,000 (quadrillion) coin and we’d have a surplus for years! Or maybe to the end of the current Obama administration…maybe…

/sarc

wolly4321 on January 7, 2013 at 9:06 PM

Sometimes the fight is the party.

I’d bet Obama would drop 12 points in the polls within five days of making such an announcement.

Right, because Obama is worried about re-election and what the polls say.

I say, pass the bill with one caveat; the coin(s) can only be minted in pure unobtanium.

Given his track record, that’s saying something.

But what’s sad is that the more absurdly he rants, the more vehemently his acolytes in the comments osculate his rectum. The token voices of reason that used to pop in from time to time all seem to have given up hope.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBShN8qT4lk&feature=youtube_gdata_player

why would the GOP want to stop Obama from maybe conceivably possibly doing something as insane as attempting to solve a standoff over spending by minting a coin worth a trillion dollars?

It is a leap of faith on your part to think that after November 6 the average American will see this as insanity. I, on the other hand beg to differ at this point.

ah, caught yourself I see. 3/4 miles by the way.

astonerii

Yeah, not a good night for math. Gotta divide by 0.5 before taking the square root. Still, quite the coin to flip, no?

Seems like all the same thing, in the end.

Paul-Cincy on January 7, 2013 at 8:53 PM

Yep. Destruction of a nation, misery, and a harsher, meaner existence.

I wonder how the destroyers will claim to be our saviors after clearly systematically destroying the wealth of the nation. Can an entire nation be that willfully ignorant?

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation_in_the_Weimar_Republic.

You have to ignore the Keynes BS they throw in there about not borrowing and taxing enough. It’s wiki. We have that covered too in this case. Mostly due to him in the first place.