Paul Krugman would like Jon Stewart to take the whole trillion-dollar coin thing a little bit more seriously.
Stewart mocked the idea on his show last week, saying “we don’t need some trillion-dollar coin gimmick, we need a way to get the world to take the U.S. dollar seriously again."
That led New York Times columnist Paul Krugman to claim, in a Sunday web interview with This Week's George Stephanopoulos, that Stewart was “ruining his brand” by not giving the trillion-dollar coin proposal the seriousness it deserves,
The idea, which was rejected by the White House Saturday, would have allowed the Treasury Department to mint a trillion dollar coin, deposit it into the Federal Reserve and use the money to pay off its debts in an aim to avert the debt ceiling crisis.
“Obviously neither he nor his staff did even five minutes of looking at the financial blogs,” Krugman said of Stewart in the web interview. “Lots of people think it’s a bad idea. Lots of people think it’s a good idea. But it’s not just, ‘Oh, those idiots.’”
Krugman has defended the coin as a “silly, but benign” way of preventing Republicans from taking the nation’s economic health hostage by demanding spending cuts in exchange for raising the country’s borrowing limit. If Congress does nothing, the U.S. could hit the debt ceiling by as early as February 15, according to a report from the Bipartisan Policy Center.
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