“What about inflation?” is the question that Paul Krugman puts in the middle of a column this week run out under the headline “The Real Story.” The column is an attempt to debunk those who have been warning that President Obama’s massive stimulus spending and other government rescue packages will lead to inflation and ruin — and a call for the president to do something big when, next week, he proposes what Mr. Krugman characterizes as new measures to boost the economy.

“Amid the inflation hysteria of early 2009,” Mr. Krugman writes in answer to his question about inflation, “the inadequate-stimulus critics pointed out that inflation always falls during sustained periods of high unemployment, and that this time should be no different. Sure enough, key measures of inflation have fallen from more than 2 percent before the economic crisis to 1 percent or less now, and Japanese-style deflation is looking like a real possibility.”

To which these columns would reply — what about gold? The price of the barbarous relic has now topped $1,200 an ounce. Or, as we prefer to put it, the value of the dollar has plunged to below 1,200^th of an ounce of gold. Its collapse since 2001, when it had a value of a 265^th of an ounce of gold, has been astonishing. These columns began writing about it in 2005, during the Bush presidency, but it is a bi-partisan question. The scrip being issued by our government has lost a quarter of its value in the first 20 months of the Obama presidency alone.

Not that we’d make too much of the presidents’ responsibilities. It’s our view that because the coining of money, and the regulating of its value, is an enumerated power granted to the Congress in Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution, it’s a responsibility of Congress. But what is this rise in the price of gold? What is it signaling? There was a time, back during the Bush Boom, when the rise in the gold price was being attributed to the boom itself, to the need for gold in manufacturing. To what is the rise in the gold price — pardon, the collapse in the value of the dollar — being attributed now?

The one thing that seems clear is this: None dare call it inflation. Not Mr. Krugman, not Mr. Bernanke, not the president, not the Congress, not the newspaper editors. When they talk about inflation they talk about the consumer price index and too much money chasing too few goods. But could it be that the value of the dollar is falling even while the prices of ordinary goods, expressed in scrip, is steady, because no one wants to buy any goods? And that the value of what passes for a dollar is being inflated anyhow by a Congress that has long since forgotten the constitutional definition of a dollar, which is as 371 ¼ grains of pure silver or its equivalent in gold?