Brother, Can You Spare a Trillion Dollar Coin?

The path to abundance, the path to utopia

The song “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” is one of the best-known songs of the Great Depression. Written in 1931 by Yip Harburg and Jay Gorney, the song has been covered by at least 52 different musicians, including Bing Crosby, Rudy Vallee, Al Jolson, Judy Collins, Tom Waits, and George Michael.

Yip Harburg, the lyricist, was inspired to write the song after his appliance business was wiped out in 1929 and he went bankrupt, a casualty of the Great Depression.

The song is about a man who has sought the American dream, but was foiled by the Great Depression. He is the universal everyman who holds various professions, being a farmer and a construction worker as well as a veteran of World War I: it is intended to embrace all listeners.

The man is someone who kept faith in America, but now feels America betrayed him. After three years of the Depression, the man has lost his job and is reduced to begging for charity.

About the song, Harburg said: “the man is really saying: I made an investment in this country. Where the hell are my dividends? ... [The song] doesn't reduce him to a beggar. It makes him a dignified human being, asking questions—and a bit outraged, too, as he should be.”

The Great Depression was a dark time in U.S. history, and was made worse by the policies of Herbert Hoover, who was president in 1929 when the economic collapse happened. Hoover refused to help his fellow Americans, because he felt that government handouts would make people lazy and not want to work.

And so, people suffered. Which is why Yip Harburg and Jay Gorney wrote “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” in 1931.

Things didn’t begin to change until March 4, 1933, which was the day Franklin Delano Roosevelt assumed office as president. Once Roosevelt took over, federal policy did an about face and massive amounts of money were infused into the economy—somewhere between 40% and 50% of GDP—through various government programs, in order to help people get through the challenging times.

FDR’s programs were very successful, helped the great majority of people get back on track, and showed the power of government as a force for good.

Which brings me to the student loan forgiveness plan that President Joe Biden announced on August 24, 2022. The plan is to cancel out between $10,000 and $20,000 of student loan debt, for anyone making less than $125,000.

The collective student loan debt in the U.S. is $1.7 trillion, with the average debt being $37,000 per student. In reality, many students owe two, three, or more times that level of debt.

No other developed nation asks its students to incur massive levels of debt to go to college. That’s because in all other developed nations, college is either free or low cost.

My son, American born and bred, is currently in graduate school in Switzerland, and his tuition is about $1,000 a semester. But that amount is actually waived, because he receives a stipend from the school.

It’s a known fact that education is one of the best investments a nation can make in its citizenry, which is why all other developed nations make college free or low cost. Meanwhile, in the U.S., going to college can potentially set a student up for a lifetime of servitude to debt.

Which is why the Biden administration decided to cancel out a portion of student debt, in order to help students free themselves either in entirety or partially from the prison of debt.

Predictably, there was outrage from some quarters about canceling student debt. Critics said it does nothing to help low-income people who never attended college, is unfair to people who already paid off their student debt, doesn't address the underlying cost of college, and just feeds an entitlement mentality by giving money to people for doing nothing.

All these criticisms derive from a scarcity mentality, one that says there’s only so much money that can go around. That thinking incorporates the idea that people shouldn’t just be given money without having earned it.

Of course, as it’s been pointed out, numerous Republican politicians got PPP (Paycheck Protection Program) loans from the government during the height of Covid, and have had those six and seven figure loans forgiven.

Instead of looking at it from a scarcity perspective, what if we looked at it from an abundance standpoint, that there is enough to go around?

In this line of thinking, students can have their debts canceled, working class people who didn’t go to college can be helped, and for that matter, all people with debt can have their debts stricken from the books.

The forgiveness of all debts, what is known as a debt jubilee, is something written about in the Old Testament. In those ancient times, every 49 years constituted a jubilee and all debts were forgiven and all slaves and prisoners were set free.

If all debts, not just student debts, were forgiven now, critics would howl and say, that’s not fair. They would talk about how it would drive up the deficit, ratchet up inflation, cause a recession, drive class warfare, and more. They would paint it in dark, scary terms that would scare the bejeezus out of people.

Meanwhile, in Denmark, college is not only free, students are paid the equivalent of $900 U.S. a month while they’re in school.

Is Denmark in crisis because of the amount of money they pay to students? On the contrary, Denmark is one of the world’s most strikingly successful societies. It’s among the most equal, trusting, and happy, with a stable social structure and good rates of economic growth. In other words, Denmark is the kind of society other countries can only dream of being.

Also in Denmark, starting workers at McDonald's are paid $22 an hour, get six weeks of paid vacation, one year parental leave, paid sick leave, universal medical insurance, and life insurance. And a burger only costs 35 cents more than an American McDonald’s burger.

Could America be more like Denmark, or for that matter, any of the other social democracies of the world?

It’s easier than you think.

You only have to sing Brother, Can You Spare a Trillion Dollar Coin? for it to happen.

What’s that you say? What exactly do I mean by a trillion dollar coin? Is that really a thing?

It’s an idea grounded in post-scarcity, abundance thinking, with the bottom line underlying the idea that there’s enough to go around.

The idea of a trillion dollar coin was first thought up over a decade ago by an economist during the Congressional debt ceiling crisis.

Because Congress has to authorize the federal government to take on more debt, in 2011 the Republicans shut down government because of their threats to block the raising of the debt ceiling.

That was when an economist suggested that the government mint a trillion dollar coin to cover the cost of government spending. It never happened, but it began an interesting discussion that continues to this day.

You see, there is a provision in U.S. law that empowers the Treasury secretary to mint and issue platinum coins in any quantity and denomination they choose.

If the Treasury Secretary were to use that provision, they could mint a platinum coin with a face value of $1 trillion—it doesn’t need to be $1 trillion worth of platinum—then deposit it in the government’s account at the Federal Reserve and draw on that account to keep paying the government’s bills without borrowing, and without any need to raise the debt ceiling.

Just like that, the federal government could do all kinds of public investment in its citizenry:

Pay college students $900 a month while in college? Check.

Make public colleges free? Check.

Allow workers to have a year parental leave? Check.

Pay a universal basic income? Check.

Fund a Green New Deal? Check.

Pay expanded child tax credits? Check.

Fund a Medicare For All? Check.

And a whole lot more. Dream it, vision it, and it could just happen.

And it wouldn’t add one cent of debt to the federal government’s ledgers. Because it’s a trillion dollar coin that the government minted and deposited in its account at the Federal Reserve.

The heads of critics would explode. Money from nothing, they would say. You can’t have that.

Yes, money from nothing. It happens all the time.

In an earlier essay I wrote, What Exactly is Money? What’s the Point of It?, I stated, “Let me give you the blunt truth: money is a fiction that we give meaning to. In other words, it’s a made up thing. Some know this—bankers for example—and they use this knowledge to play God.”

And that’s exactly the argument against the idea of a trillion dollar coin, that it would expose money to be a fiction.

Neil Buchanan, an opponent of minting the coin who is an economist and law professor at the University of Florida’s Levin College of Law, wrote in a blog that issuing a trillion-dollar coin would be tantamount to “pulling back the curtain on the entirely ephemeral nature of money and finance itself.”

He continued: “A monetary system simply cannot work if people do not collectively take a leap of faith. We accept currency or precious metals— which have no inherent use-value for everyday purposes—because we think that other people will accept them in turn. This group delusion allows us to say that money is money. If the delusion starts to fall apart, then there are very real, very negative effects. It is no laughing matter to expose the fundamentally unreal nature of money to public ridicule.”

Yes, if you pull the curtain back on the unreality that is money, you open up an entire can of worms, one that says the government can just create money out of thin air, and doesn’t even have to call it part of the public debt.

So yes brother, you can spare a trillion dollar coin, and you can then use it to fund a society that allows everyone to thrive.

There would be no more class warfare in which one class of people says, hey that’s not fair, why should students get their loans canceled when I didn’t have the option to go to college?

Because everyone can be helped, we could acknowledge everyone’s story and everyone’s successes. And if there are failures, the social safety net is there to help them.

This is what a society rooted in abundance would look like. It would be the closest thing to utopia a society could create.

It’s also the best way for democracy to flourish. And democracy isn’t exactly having a field day these days, because of the scarcity thinking that creates class warfare.

What do I mean by that? Every time you hear people on the far right talk about “the elites” and how they’re screwing everyone, that’s part of that class warfare.

The people on the far right do have a point. The system is rigged to favor those in the wealth class.

And that’s where creating a society in which everyone can thrive, in which abundance is available for everyone, obstructs the capacity for the wealth class to rig the system.

And all you have to do to make it happen is sing, Brother, Can You Spare a Trillion Dollar Coin?