I fear that the Good Professor DeLong hasn't quite thought through :
Mail out ten $1000 platinum coins to everybody who filed a tax return in April 2011
The point of using platinum coins rather than, say, $1,000 bills, is that platinum has an intrinsic value and so this is a real transfer, not just printing more money.
Hmm, yes, but: the number of individuals who file income tax returns is around the 140 million number. Platinum is currently worth some $1,500 an ounce.
Each coin should therefore be around .66 of an ounce: if it's larger than that then it's worth more than $1,000, if smaller, then the intrinsic value is less than face value.
We are thus going to send 6.66 ounces of platinum to each tax filer: 932 million ounces.
There are 31 (roughly, no, just not worried about the difference between Troy and Avoirdupois here) ounces to the kilo, so we've 30 million kilos of platinum to send out, or 30,000 tonnes.
. Annual global production is about 180 tonnes. Total known recoverable reserves are:
World resources of PGMs in mineral concentrations that can be mined economically are estimated to total more than 100 million kilograms.
Ah, our platinum coin plan is asking that we manage to mobilise one third of all the platinum known to be on the planet. Certainly, it calls for more platinum to be used than all of the platinum that we have managed to mine so far.
We'll file this in the "economist uses hyperbole to make a point" file, shall we?
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