Yes you read the title right! Once upon a time silly ideas that were introduced to the public would be laughed at and then quietly disappear hopefully forever. Times have changed and this silly idea was proposed by Nobel Prize winning economists. I would imagine most people would have been startled by the news of this proposed denomination of a coin when it was proposed as a solution to our nation's current debt problem.

News of this coin even made the pages of the Huffington Post. Ever since Alexander the Great cut the Gordian Knot instead of going to the trouble of untying it, people always want to take the easy route and hit the "easy button." The idea for the $1 trillion platinum coin will now live on in Internet Immortality, much like the rumor that "In God We Trust" was removed from Presidential dollar coins when they were introduced in 2007 instead of being moved to the edge of the coins.

With the "In God We Trust" rumor, nothing dangerous could or would have happened. While the $1 trillion platinum coin idea is based on the enabling law that created platinum coins, the bad part of the idea is that it would let the Treasury secretary determine the denomination for the platinum coin. Some folks have even argued that the debt ceiling issue is silly in its own right.
While arbitrarily creating a $1 trillion platinum coin may seem trivial, the debt ceiling argument is anything but trivial. Part of the argument for such a strange denomination stems from the idea that creating the denomination would be a rather benign approach to circumvent certain laws while adhering to the debt ceiling law would be considered to be vile and vicious.

You really need to step back and think this one over. Once any power is granted to a bureaucrat, you can bet your last trillion dollar platinum coin that that power will be used and abused again and again. Once the debt ceiling issue becomes a non-issue, what is going to prevent more of these trillion dollar platinum coins being produced and used to "finance the entire operation of the government for perpetuity?

Why not just remit all taxes and simply create the money in higher-denomination coin form? Many gold bugs have feared a German Weimer type of hyperinflation since the financial collapse of 2007. The use of a trillion dollar platinum coin would certainly fit the bill. So far the idea for this type of coin has been rejected for the time being. Hopefully this silly idea will suffer its share of public ridicule and quietly fade away into the past.