{"id":183616,"date":"2013-01-13T19:22:00","date_gmt":"2013-01-14T00:22:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2013\/01\/13\/what-a-surprise-another-cave\/"},"modified":"2013-01-13T19:22:00","modified_gmt":"2013-01-14T00:22:00","slug":"what-a-surprise-another-cave","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2013\/01\/13\/what-a-surprise-another-cave\/","title":{"rendered":"What a Surprise, Another Cave"},"content":{"rendered":"<div style=\"border: 1px solid black; float: right; margin: 0px 10px; padding: 5px; text-align: center; width: 250px;\"><a href=\"http:\/\/i.imgur.com\/s0o6I.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" border=\"0\" bordercolor=\"white\" src=\"http:\/\/i.imgur.com\/s0o6I.jpg\" width=\"240\" \/><\/a><br \/><i>Another Cave<\/i><\/div>\n<p>Yes, as a final f%$# you to the average American, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/blogs\/wonkblog\/wp\/2013\/01\/12\/treasury-we-wont-mint-a-platinum-coin-to-sidestep-the-debt-ceiling\/\">the White House has ruled out the platinum coin<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: blue;\">The Treasury Department will not mint a trillion-dollar platinum coin to get around the debt ceiling. If they did, the Federal Reserve would not accept it.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span> <span style=\"color: blue;\">That\u2019s the bottom line of the statement that Anthony Coley, a spokesman for the Treasury Department, gave me today. \u201cNeither the Treasury Department nor the Federal Reserve believes that the law can or should be used to facilitate the production of platinum coins for the purpose of avoiding an increase in the debt limit,\u201d he said.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span> <span style=\"color: blue;\">The inclusion of the Federal Reserve is significant. For the platinum coin idea to work, the Federal Reserve would have to treat it as a legal way for the Treasury Department to create currency. If they don\u2019t believe it\u2019s legal and would not credit the Treasury Department\u2019s deposit, the platinum coin would be worthless. <\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span> <span style=\"color: blue;\">The idea of minting a platinum coin to invalidate the debt ceiling comes from a few key sentences tacked onto the 1997 Omnibus Consolidated Appropriations Act. \u201cNotwithstanding any other provision of law,\u201d it reads, \u201cthe Secretary of the Treasury may mint and issue platinum coins in such quantity and of such variety as the Secretary determines to be appropriate.\u201d<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Even if you decide that you will not do this, you do <b>not<\/b> take this off the table without getting something in return.<\/p>\n<p>At best, it&#8217;s a kind of mania with the Obama, he wants to be seen as the reasonable person in the room, even when in a situation where this does not work, at worst, he&#8217;s getting everything that he wants, which includes savaging Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Another Cave Yes, as a final f%$# you to the average American, the White House has ruled out the platinum coin: The Treasury Department will not mint a trillion-dollar platinum coin to get around the debt ceiling. If they did, the Federal Reserve would not accept it. That\u2019s the bottom line of the statement that &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1038,998,979,1173],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-183616","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-budget","category-congress","category-wanker","category-white-house"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183616"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=183616"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183616\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=183616"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=183616"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=183616"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}