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Platinum Coin Ban By Greg Walden, Republican Congressman, Would Nix Debt Ceiling Tactic

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lostlakehiker1/07/2013 10:50:59 pm PST

These constitutional debates miss a point made by the Economist recently: politics is not an abstract logic puzzle. The constitution contains a number of contradictions. Conflicting wishes to keep up spending on favorite programs, and to cut overall spending, are common in families, let alone nations. It’s part of the human condition.

In families, a decision is mostly arrived at via compromise. Daddy doesn’t get to just SAY. The U.S. doesn’t operate in a vacuum either. Minting trillion dollar coins, or for that matter, minting a million “million dollar” coins, just won’t do. Whether it’s theoretically legal or not is beside the point. We, and our dollar, would become laughing stocks.

Current policy just won’t work. A fix, or a crash, are the only long term options. For a fix, we’ll need both substantial tax increases on the top part of the middle class (say, everybody in the top 15 or 20 percent of income), and substantial trimming of spending (say, …ah, but I know better than to name programs. Every cut cuts a worthy purpose, from someone’s point of view. Even subsidies for peanuts, rebuilding flooded vacation homes, and mohair ranchers). Anyway, the big money is in programs that have a legitimate purpose, and the argument is over whether they serve it well, or whether that purpose trumps avoiding the fiscal fate of Greece, or whether we’re in a bind and it’s just flat impossible to fund that worthy purpose at current levels, even given as much tax increases as the economy will bear, and still escape the fiscal ruin that would abruptly scuttle those programs.

And on top of all that, we need a huge increase in efforts to address global warming. It’s not an easy situation to cope with.