Mint the Platinum Coin

President Obama may authorize the minting of a trillion dollar coin to pay for policies that are already in place. Paying for what Congress has already done is, of course, a rather good idea.

Good idea, this coin suggestion, and not only because it would do an end run around the Republicans, who are caught in primitive defiance (in a way that endangers the world economy). It would also be an object lesson in what a sovereign power can do:

A state is not like a household in a state, contra the right wing Friedmanesque rhetoric of thirty years' vintage. Not a family. Not a person with credit card debt and a mortgage etc.

National debt and the debt ceiling are not like credit card debt and a personal credit limit.

Money is an arbitrary sign. (Just look at the way Brazil eased itself into the real, wiping its debt in a moment.) Cartoons of a gigantic coin crushing America remind me of the paper money panic in the Romantic period.

Do it, Obama.