Here's What Happened the Last Time the U.S. Defaulted on Its Debt

• By Matthew O'Brien
• January 16, 2013
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White House Crushes Death Star Petition, Nerd Dreams Everywhere

• By David A. Graham
• January 14, 2013
• comments

It turns out the Death Star won't be coming to a galaxy not too far away anytime soon.

Last month, we brought you news of a petition demanding that the White House build a Death Star, noting that it had reached a threshhold that would require administration response. Now the response is here and ... it's disappointing -- a fact that Paul Shawcross, the author and chief of the science and space branch of the Office of Management and Budget acnkowledged in his title:

Frankly, I find his lack of faith disturbing. Does Shawcross really not believe that with a little Yankee ingenuity, the American military-industrial complex couldn't solve the original Death Star's susceptibility to an X-wing fighter? American exceptionalism really is dead. 

Shawcross is surely right, however, that in a time of budget cuts -- some $492 billion is due to be cut from the Pentagon's budget on March 1, barring a congressional fix -- such a large outlay for defense might be untenable. Unfortunately, Shawcross does not offer any insight into whether the White House believes a Death Star would be legal. The 1967 Outer Space Treaty bans weapons of mass destruction in space, but allows conventional ...

The Blog Commenter Who Invented the Trillion-Dollar Coin

• By Ben Terris
• January 11, 2013
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The Atlantic has already dubbed it “the single most important comment in the history of Internet comments. Probably.”  

In the midst of the debt-ceiling negotiations in the summer of 2011, a commenter on the blogPragmatic Capitalism offered a simple suggestion to end the debate over the debt ceiling once and for all: “Geithner could sidestep the debt ceiling this afternoon by ordering the West Point Mint to coin a 1 oz. $ 1 trillion coin.” For months, it suffered the fate of the vast majority of Internet comments lingering in the ash heap of history. And yet, somehow, this one comment was plucked from obscurity and has become the talk of the nation.

Lately it’s seemed like everyone wants to talk about this platinum coin idea. It resurfaced largely thanks to Joe Weisenthal of Business Insider and Josh Barro of Bloomberg View, and it has now become a favorite topic for journalists around the country (including Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman) and was even brought up in a White House press briefing this week. But it all started with someone going by the name of “Beowulf.”

I found the handle to be strangely fitting. In Beowulf, the hero needs ...

The Emergency Debt Plan That Would Put U.S. Citizens Second

• By Niraj Chokshi
• January 8, 2013
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In just a few weeks, the federal government won’t be able to pay all its bills on time. If that happens, the nation could start paying its lenders, many of them foreign, before its citizens. 

At some point no later than March 1, the government will reach what the Bipartisan Policy Center has ominously named the X-Date, “the day on which Treasury no longer can pay the debts of the United States except with money that is coming in on that day,” according to Steve Bell,  the center's senior director of economic policy and a former longtime senior Capitol Hill staffer. Unless Congress intervenes to raise the country's borrowing limit, the U.S. will default on its debt. There might be one way for the government to avoid defaulting, however. Treasury could pick and choose which bills to pay, with a preference toward paying interest on U.S. debt, much of it held by foreign investors.

Between Feb. 15 and March 15, the BPC predicts the nation will collect just $277 billion to pay $452 billion in obligations, including payments related to tax refunds, Medicare and Medicaid, Social Security, debt interest and more. In other words, Treasury ...

The Ultimate Stimulus: Death Star Petition Requires White House Response

• By Mark Micheli
• December 13, 2012
• comments

A petition asking the Obama administration to secure funding for construction of a Death Star—the planet-destroying super space weapon that was blown up not once, but twice, during the original Star Wars trilogy (that’ll teach you to cover your exhaust ports…)—has secured enough signatures to require a response from the White House.

The request was started Nov. 14 on the White House’s We the People website. Any petition that earns more than 25,000 signatures in 30 days requires an official response from an administration official. The platform, launched Sept. 22, 2011, allows citizens to petition the government on a wide range of topics, many of which are more, let’s say, realistic.

Speaking of realistic, should the White House actually entertain the petition, how much funding would be required to build an actual planet-sized Death Star? Lucky for all of us, the mathematics Jedis over at Centives, an economics blog run by students of Lehigh University, figured it out earlier this year:

“The cost of the steel alone?” they asked. “At 2012 prices, about $852,000,000,000,000,000. Or roughly 13,000 times the world's GDP.”

That is one hell of a ...