Until now, I have not weighed in on the Great Platinum Koin Konspiracy of One-Thirteen, so I quite forgive you for not as yet having made up your minds regarding the wisdom of the ploy. Allow me therefore to present Dispositive Evidence as to why the president should immediately get on the phone to the Treasury and say, "mint me that coin right fucking now." And hang up.
Creating the platinum coin would piss off Megan McArdle. Ergo, minting the coin would be empirically correct.
McArdle's post is shouty gibberish of the "everyone is wrong except Megan McArdle" class, and need not detain us. All one ought to consider is that lazy hacks are not even right once an ever.
Which brings us by inevitable vicus of regurgitation back to Ann Althouse and environs. Althouse fondly imagines that she has slain K'Thruglu through an ingenious combined attack consisting of pig-ignorance, preening allodoxia, and willful idiocy. Which is to say, the usual horseshit.
Paul Krugman responds to the pushback he's received on "the trillion-dollar-coin thing":
There seem to be two kinds of objections. One is that it would be undignified. Here’s how to think about that....
The professor is about to teach us how to think. Get ready!
... we have a situation in which a terrorist may be about to walk into a crowded room and threaten to blow up a bomb he’s holding.
Okay. A hypothetical. I'm up for hypotheticals. And it's an analogy, because the trillion-dollar-coin thing isn't promoted as a solution to terrorism. But terrorism is something that you can picture quite concretely and you understand it as very real and scary — unlike the debt ceiling problem which is awfully abstract. (Even to say "ceiling" is to resort to metaphor.)
Well, she concedes, or senses, that Krugman is using a metaphor and not advocating literal clown-based law enforcement, which is for Althouse a major achievement. However, "the debt celiling problem" is only "awfully abstract" if you are either genuinely or disingenuously sufficiently cretinous to take the several minutes it requires to understand it.
Which is why Althouse doesn't, or can't (who cares) acknowledge why the extended clown metaphor Krugman uses works. If a gang of utterly absurd cretins manages to engineer a ridiculously dangerous situation, what can you do but send in the clowns? It takes a joker to catch a fool.
I mean, look -- in 20-thousand-10 a lawless bunch came riding into town; they reached for their guns with their tiny little hands and they shot the sherriff down. They terrorized the citizens, they caused a saloon brawl, and no one would stand up to them, even though they were so small.
So the platinum coin would come to right a wrong.
(Yes, yes, that is an obscure joke. Permit me my small joys, redsnouts. At any rate comparing The Tea Party to The Terror of Tiny Town is in every respect thoroughly cringe-worthily apposite.)
Nothing Althouse says equates to a "point"; she doesn't understand the actual issue, and on that basis crowns herself Queen Honeytwit of the Dipshits.
Like I said, same as it ever was.