Now that Congress has kicked the debt ceiling down the road a few months, what of the idea of minting a $1 trillion coin made of platinum? Supposedly our leaders would smelt this trillion dollar slug from a bit of platinum and deposit it at the Federal Reserve, against which the Fed would pay out irredeemable electronic paper ticker tender to cover debts. The scheme’s most famous backer turns out to be the Nobel laureate Paul Krugman.

Maybe they ought to call the coin “The Krugman.” That’s how ardently the economist has embraced the scheme. He did so the other day in a column that ran in the Times under the headline “Biden Should Ignore the Debt Limit and Mint a $1 Trillion Coin.” The professor-turned-columnist seems to have been set off by Senator Rubio’s suggestion that President Biden’s $3.5 trillion budget “isn’t socialism, it’s Marxism.”

“The fact that Republicans routinely say such nonsense,” Mr. Krugman kvetches, “is why the Biden administration should mint a $1 trillion platinum coin or declare that the Constitution gives it the right to issue whatever debt is needed to fund the government — or use some other trick I haven’t thought of …” That federal policy on taxing and spending is set by “a straightforward legislative process,” he says, “we all learned in civics class.”

“Do students still take civics?” Mr. Krugman asks in an aside.

Mr. Krugman goes on to complain that there is “a quirk” in the budget process requiring that Congress “must also separately authorize the federal government to take on more debt.” What he calls a “quirk” turns out to be the second of the great powers — after taxing — that the Constitution grants to Congress, namely the power to borrow money on the credit of the United States. That “quirk” goes only to Congress.

Mr. Krugman goes on to characterize the “quirk” — the reservation to Congress of the borrowing power — as being, historically, “a mere technicality.” Is that what the one-time adviser to Enron learned in civics class? By that measure, what in the parchment wouldn’t be a technicality? In any event, it’s also to Congress that the Constitution grants the power to coin money and regulate the value thereof.

Mr. Krugman says that there is in existing law a “strange provision” empowering the Treasury Secretary to issue platinum coins. “Presumably,” Mr. Krugman says, the purpose “was to allow the creation of coins celebrating people or events. But the language doesn’t say that.” There it is in the shell of a nut — the liberal mentality toward the intention of Congress. Take a mile for every inch given.

The good news is that, at least so far, no one in high office is buying into the idea of “The Krugman.” At the moment, it’s too quirky even for Janet Yellen. It is a mark of the age of fiat money that a Nobel laureate is prepared to spend billions against a small amount of platinum embossed with the amount $1 trillion on the grounds that, as Mr. Krugman puts it, “gimmickry in the defense of sanity” — and, he adds, of democracy — “is no vice.”

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Drawing by Elliott Banfield, courtesy of the artist.