"Public opinion running about 5:1 against the Trillion Dollar Coin on the first night of our Florida poll among those with an opinion on it."I wonder how they worded this question. No, really, I wonder. Because I think it's an intrinsically difficult thing to poll. The economics are a bit involved, the legal analysis is highly involved, it sounds so extremely silly, and the case for doing it is so extremely contextual. If you just ask people whether they would favor or oppose the minting of a $1 trillion platinum coin to fund the government, even without any explicitly biased language, of course they'll be opposed: it's ridiculous, which is why we don't do it most of the time. But suppose you gave the following introductory paragraph:
Congress limits by statute the amount of debt the federal government can issue. Economists predict that if the debt limit were hit, and the government could not borrow enough money to fund all its obligations, the consequences could be disastrous for the world economy. The federal government is currently at this limit, and for the past month the Treasury Department has been executing financial maneuvers to keep the government funded, but those maneuvers will only be successful for about another month. Observers have speculated that the Republican-controlled House of Representatives might not raise the debt limit by this deadline. One option the Administration would have should the debt limit not be raised would be to exploit a loophole in the coinage laws that would allow the Secretary of the Treasury to mint a platinum coin with a $1 trillion denomination, and use that money to fund the government until Congress raises the debt ceiling. Do you think this would be an acceptable response by the Administration were Congress to fail to raise the debt limit in the next month?That would pretty much spell out the logic of even considering the platinum coin in the first place. Note that it's not entirely biased, either; I very deliberately decided to refer to the mint-the-coin option as "exploiting a loophole," which is what it is. The key is really that I've framed it as a response to a crisis. I bet if you gave that introductory paragraph, the people still on the phone by the end (because, let's be honest, it's pretty damn long) wouldn't be so opposed anymore.
Except, of course, this really would be a messaged result, and while those can be interesting, as they suggest how much support something could get if it got its message out really well, it's certainly quite questionable to simply ask a poll with that much messaging and present it as a straight-up result. Perhaps you could do a comparison within the same poll, i.e. ask the bare-bones question first and then give a little description of why in the world someone might think it was a good idea to mint a $1 trillion platinum coin, and see how much support for the coin increased between the two. But it's hard, I think, to meaningfully gauge public opinion on a topic like this that is just so damn esoteric—not, of course, because people are idiots or because they couldn't understand such things, but because most people haven't taken any economics courses or any law courses or even any public policy courses, and don't spend their time reading blogosphere posts about stuff like the law and economics of the platinum coin.
The problem is, we are both committed to the idea of a government that is responsive to public opinion and to having the government make a serious attempt to solve any and all public policy problems that come before it, no matter how esoteric or tricky. At times like this, when it honestly seems like the best policy might be the utterly ridiculous one that, until you dig into the details, seems with good reason completely insane, those two commitments are in genuine tension with one another.
In any event, they say they won't mint any coins, which looks like it's probably a good idea politically. I'm not sure this means they actually won't be minting the coin, though, because you'd have to say you weren't going to mint it until the very minute when it became necessary to avoid some sort of default; it does seem somewhat unlikely, though. Either way, I really would like to know exactly what they plan to do when Republicans, faced with the Administration's admirable "we're just not negotiating over this, pass the damn thing already" stance, just say no. Actually having some kind of default happen would be, well, not good. It would be nice to think they do have some scheme in mind to avoid it, coin or no.
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