Play Money

Remember Monopoly money? When I played, I always surreptitiously slid a $500 under the board, so I would "forget" about it, and other players would, too. It was sort of my off-shore account, not real visible to the authorities. :)

Sometimes Monopoly money got used for other purposes (like pretend grocery shopping, or to teach budgeting), or it got colored upon, cut with scissors, chewed up by pets or toddlers, and it often disappeared altogether. But, the great thing about Monopoly money was... if you lost it or it was otherwise no good, you could always make more!

President Obama must have played Monopoly as a kid. Because his administration is talking about making some new stuff to take the place of what they've searched around and discovered... they don't actually have! So they will just play Monopoly and make some more. Out of platinum this time instead of paper.

$1,000,000,000,000.   One coin.   One time.

(yeah, sure..)

One of my favorite sportswriters, Gregg Easterbrook, whose column (TMQ) I read religiously on ESPN.com, included a piece in this week's edition which contained this snippet about the trillion-dollar-coin gambit, which could get around a recalcitrant Congress when it comes to debt ceiling time. He suggests: why stop at a trillion? It's fake anyway, so how about a ga-zill-ion dollars, like when we were kids? He says:

The Trillion-Dollar Coin Won't Work in a Coinstar Machine: The platinum trillion-dollar coin has been getting a lot of attention. Comedian John Oliver suggested one should be used in the Super Bowl coin toss, to heighten excitement. Slate asked readers to design a trillion-dollar coin. One has Big Bird on the obverse, another the legend MADE IN CHINA on the reverse. The winner depicts Barack Obama doing the Doctor Evil finger pose.

An obscure statute authorizes the Secretary of the Treasury to mint platinum coins "in the Secretary's discretion," in any denomination. Why stop at a trillion dollars? The United States could mint, say, a $100 trillion coin and use it to purchase Europe. We could mint a $1 quadrillion coin and use it to purchase the Milky Way.

I like it.  Let's buy Europe!  Kind of like Monopoly and Risk combined.  You don't fight wars for countries anymore, you BUY them.  With fake money!  How great is that?!?

American ingenuity at work, baby.