Two platinum coins? That sounds like the change we need.

Tr0mBoNe: Arbitrary problems have arbitrary solutions.

In the past, the police had somehow gotten it into their heads that it was illegal to take photographs of anything, anywhere. Some said it was because of "copyright" some said it was because of "homeland security", but the result was the same: they'd make you delete the photographs.

One enterprising photographer came up with the idea of making a "photography license". It was similar to a library card, except that you added a photograph of your face in the top-left corner with glue or a laminator. When the cops stopped you for taking pictures, you could then respond, 'it's okay, I have a photography license', and show them it.

An imaginative solution to an imaginary problem.

The Stealth Hippopotamus: Lumpmoose: What's the actual physical process for moving the coins from the US Mint to the Federal Reserve? If they're stolen, does the US government just declare them worthless?

Once the coins are created I would think they would be worth whatever they are listed at. But good luck turning into a bank for 10s and 20s. If they could just change the value of current currency (say that 5 times fast!) they could just say that quarters were now worth 5 bucks and we would pump billions into the economy and not need to print or mint a thing.

I would think that thief would be the best solution. Someone would steal the coins and have to lock them away somewhere forever. There for you have the money in the system but locked down. This is the same thing we get with the dollar coin push every couple of years. So the value of the dollar would decrease to the point that we could pay off the debt with piles of useless green backs.

The day these get made you better switch your ARM to a fixed.

"I like it," said Joseph Gagnon of the Peterson Institute for International Economics. "There's nothing that's obviously economically problematic about it."

Has he not heard of inflation?!

Joseph Gagnon received a BA from Harvard University in 1981 and a PhD in economics from Stanford University in 1987.

I'd love to pick his brain on this topic.

It really is inflation, just Gagnon style.

Problem solved.

Here's a better plan.

Take $2 Trillion worth of platinum and make a lot of it into medical instruments and sell the rest to raise, say, $1.5 Trillion in cash. Train millions of doctors to perform cosmetic surgery. Send them all over the USA and the world to perform cosmetic surgery on the old, the ugly, and the victims of war and civil war, etc.--all expenses paid for by Obamacare and USAID.

People are paid more money when they are younger and better-looking, so all this cosmetic surgery will not only employ a few million people as doctors, nurses, make-up artists, temps, cleaning staff, cooks, etc., but will also give a massive boost to employment, wages and salaries, and pensions. It will also give a massive boost to everything from hospital building to food processing (hard to eat after cosmetic surgery--need a lot of soft, bland food).

Thanks to the free cosmetic surgery (and follow-up care) millions, maybe billions of people will be more attractive, which will give a boost to fashion, restaurants, hotels, prostitution, and thousands of other sectors of the economy. Also they will be more likely to spend on new houses (as they find more attractive spouses) and so forth.

I can not imagine a sector of the economy that would not be improved by massive cosmetic surgery on the fuglies. I could use a bit of work myself.

If you simply give people trillions of dollars in "money", whether it is fiat currency or precious metals, it will deflate the value of the precious metals and inflate the price of everything else by causing inflation. There is no difference between dumping a massive pile of gold into the economy and printing money. Only fools think there is.

Just look at what the treasure of the New World did to the economy of Portugal and Spain. The price of precious metals fell by about a third according to Adam Smith, the great Liberal Economist. The Spanish economy was ruined and rather than making Spain richer, it merely destroyed gold and silver mines in Europe, which couldn't compete on cost with slaves that were worked to death in the New World.

In short, this idea is one of the dumbest I've ever heard and any one of my jokes would do the economy more good if you printed them on toilet paper and handed it out for free on the street outside of high schools and grade schools.

Truther: Dems have done/said PLENTY of clown nose stuff over the years...

Oh, no doubt. But come on. The GOP sales pitch these days is basically "government is fundamentally a bad thing, at best a necessary evil, so put us in charge of it and we'll make sure it behaves itself."

Whether or not you agree with that, it's the reason Congress' approval rating hovers around 10%. 80% of the Democrats polled are furious that it never does anything, and 100% of the Republicans polled are furious that it might.