No Gold-backed Dollar? Oh my!

You mean to say that I can’t go to the Treasury and demand gold for my dollar? That’s criminal! I bet it was Bush who did it, or possibly Clinton, that scoundrel. What? What’s that you say? The dollar hasn’t been backed by gold since 1971? And it hasn’t been domestically backed by gold since 1933? How did we ever survive this long without disaster? And how did we go through the most economically productive years of our economy?

Must be Bush or Clinton’s fault somehow.

Eric Abernethysenior, materials science and engineering

Yielding’s article is meant to cause panic

There is a reason why our nation has abandoned the gold standard, and it ties in with an economic principle called supply and demand. Most economists disagree with a return to the gold standard because of this very basic principle. The reason? Because gold’s value comes from what the economy dictates: its ability to purchase needed goods and services.

One of the biggest arguments in favor of returning to the gold standard is that printing paper money promotes harmful deficit spending and ultimately drives inflation up. Yet deficit spending is exactly what we are doing in this nation these days. We have a president who insists on financing a costly war, frivolously wastes taxpayer money on useless defense projects, and yet insists on a tremendous tax cut, with a good portion of that cut going towards the wealthy.

Mr. Yielding does not acknowledge the wisdom of the majority of economists with regard to the gold standard. Paul Krugman, a renowned professor of economics at Princeton University, best sums up the counterargument to the proponents of the gold standard as that of true sin of King Midas: “that gold is just a metal. If it sometimes seems to be more, that is only because society has found it convenient to use gold as a medium of exchange–a bridge between other, truly desirable, objects.”

So instead of looking at our dismal economy and weakening dollar and proclaiming that the gold standard will magically fix everything, perhaps we should try to fix our economy and stop spending recklessly.

Paul McCauleysophomore, nuclear engineering