Ordinarily, NO, as this is passed in the normal course of business - this merely authorizes the issuance of debt instruments to finance the spending that was previously authorized.
But, now the answer is YES, when one party has decided to exploit this legal quirk separating the spending from the issuance of debt to execute a DOS attack on the other party currently in power.
>>Did people who pass the budget a few months ago get buyer's remorse?
Yes, since they are no longer in the driver's seat, they want to execute a DOS on the other party now in the driver's seat, and they don't care if it crashes the country or global economy, as they think they won't be blamed and the other party will.
It really is as simple as that, putting party over country.
But the party in power has 50 + tie-breaking VP vote? What gives?
It only takes 51 votes to change the filibuster rules, but at least 2 Democratic Senators oppose that, so we're kind of stuck.
60 votes are required to break the filibuster in the Senate, and whatever their private ideas (e.g., I've seen reports from credible sources that no less than 44 R Senators personally support raising the debt ceiling), there are apparently zero R votes to go against their leader and end the filibuster.
Interesting times.
Congress has approved a budget not merely authorizing but legally mandating spending and necessary borrowing to finance it.
It has also imposed a debt ceiling, purportedly prohibiting borrowing beyond a certain amount.
Minting the coin is one way of using an unquestionably legal power to resolve the conflict of mandates.
Another option is to simply ignore the debt limit because it conflicts with the budget mandate (and, given existing obligations, the 14th Amendment’s debt clause.)
> But president can mint coins without Congress's authorization
Only platinum coins. For...reasons that are mostly irrelevant.
Peter Schiff has touched on this, but who in the world is willing to lend to the US at the moment when the US just came out on record as running the biggest ponzi scheme ever?
I wanted to believe in MMT; it sounded at first like it could be something completely counterintuitive that just works, and some time later a rational quantity of math would explain it.
At the present, I think that was too wishful. The US seems to be able to print unlimitedly because of its unique status as the reserve currency. Once other countries opt out, and some are making concrete steps towards doing so, our dollar will quickly collapse, and it'll take the rest of our lives to experience a quality of living akin to today's.
No it wouldn't
> provide further proof that Biden is indeed an idiot,
Idiot or not, the coin is actually a solid move.
> and basically pushed the US to the slippery slope,
Nope.
> that ends with the US economy being in the same condition as Venezuelan.
TF?! Not at all. You do not belong in this conversation. You have no clue what you are talking about.
Look at any charts of the M1/M2 money supply (that haven't been discontinued) and they seem to strongly indicate we're on a slippery slope towards hyperinflation, that's been the trend for several decades and seems to be rapidly accelerating- At least that's what it looks like to a dumb layman like myself
"What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence" OP provided no evidence, so I dismissed without evidence.
> it's one of the most blatant examples of debasing a currency I can imagine
No. QE is. look it up. Actually minting a coin is smart.
If it was used to redeem debt held by outside parties, that would be an issue. Redeeming Fed holdings has no effect on circulating holdings or public debt holdings, and is basically a nonevent. The money creation that matters regarding those already happened when the Fed created real circulating money to buy the Treasuries in the first place. (Which, btw, did not have catastrophic effects on confidence in the US dollar.)
Because the coin can be any arbitrary amount, and its only use will be to redeem federal debt held by the Federal Reserve. Using multiple coins serves no purpose.
Sure this time it may used as an accounting trick. But it also frees government to spend recklessly until current money is worthless.
Substantively, its not when its used to redeem Fed-held government debt.
The money creation involved happened when the Fed created money to buy the debt (and, lo and behold, did not produce ultrainflation); interaction between two hands of the money-issuing government isn't substantively “money creation”, its accounting gimnicks with a platinum token.
> Sure this time it may used as an accounting trick. But it also frees government to spend recklessly until current money is worthless.
No, the law authorizing it already frees government to do that (and, more generally, the Constitutional power of creating money.)
There are procedural constraints, like the budget and the Constitutional assignment of power over it, which prevent the executive willy-nilly spending such money having minted it (unlike, say, the Fed’s money creating powers, where it can spend all the money it creates fairly freely, which is how it bought the debt it now holds.)
This is really a non-issue; its one of the clearly-legal routes around the stupid, contradictory (with mandated spending in the budget), counterproductive, and probably constitutionally null at least insofar as it purports to constrain later-mandated spending, and possibly more generally, debt ceiling without openly defying it.
A less legally clear method is just to treat it as the complete legal nullity it may be and ignore it completely. In many ways, I think that's the best option, but effectively “mint the coin” is no different in substance.