Would you rather have a $1 trillion coin or an IOU from the government for your tax return or paycheck? Both ideas have been suggested as ways of giving President Obama unilateral ways of creating the money necessary to pay money the federal government owes after the country hits its debt ceiling.
Some have argued that laws would allow the federal government to mint a commemorative coin worth $1 trillion that would be placed with the Federal Reserve, giving the Federal Treasury money to use.
Alternatively, Edward Kleinbard argues that the government should just write out “scrip” to people it owes money to.
Host Carmen Russell-Sluchansky examined the deficit, the trillion dollar coins and IOUs with Kleinbard, the former chief of staff at the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation and a law professor at the University of Southern California.
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