Want to solve the debt ceiling crisis? Try this one weird trick.

It’s debt ceiling time again, when Congress votes to spend money we don’t have and then votes again to borrow money to pay for it all.

This one is a little different from most debt ceiling fights: The last Congress voted to spend the money and left town without raising the borrowing limit, which means this Congress must clean up the mess. That shifts the blame a bit, but it doesn’t solve the problem.

Most days, people don’t think about the massive federal debt. We know Congress has not passed a balanced budget since the 1990s. We know, at some level, that all the federal benefits we enjoy are paid for by borrowing, and that the debt must someday be paid. But once that debt passes from billions to trillions, it becomes hard for us to wrap our heads around quite how large that is.

The United States currently owes $31.4 trillion. That’s the highest the national debt has ever been — about $94,000 per American citizen. As a percentage of our GDP, the debt is now nearly the highest ever, surpassed only by the debt incurred during World War II.

“The United States currently owes $31.4 trillion. That’s the highest the national debt has ever been.”

The war debts of the 1940s came from a unique and unusual situation: the biggest war in human history. When that emergency ended, the debt began to decline. Now we find ourselves emerging from another emergency in COVID-19, but if spending has declined slightly, we still show no sign of being willing to limit it in the long term. No one in Congress or in the White House wants to make the hard choices necessary to stave off financial disaster.

Instead, we look for tricks and gimmicks to paper over the problem and leave the real work to the next generation.

Unlimited spending and unlimited borrowing must someday come to an end, but no one wants to face that possibility until they absolutely must. It shows our deep unseriousness as a people that solutions like “Mint the Coin” have moved from a blogosphere fringe theory to the subject of discussion by Nobel Prize-winning economists and major newspapers.

The proposal behind “Mint the Coin” arose in 2010 on a financial blog and focuses on the idea of seigniorage — the profit a government makes when they turn metal into coins. If a quarter has 5 cents worth of copper and nickel in it, the government makes 20 cents every time they produce one. This is not normally a big part of federal revenues (we actually lose money making pennies), but it is a long-standing practice that no one doubts is legitimate.

Where the “coiners” go off the rails is in proposing that the U.S. Mint produce a trillion-dollar platinum coin and deposit it with the Federal Reserve. A law passed in 1996 to allow the mint to sell collectible platinum coins did not specify which denominations could be minted, which led some people to note that, well, actually, minting a trillion-dollar coin would be perfectly legal.

Are they right? The law — 31 U.S. Code § 5112(k) — contains no limit on the denomination of platinum coinage. Its author, former Rep. Mike Castle of Delaware, has said that he never intended this expansive interpretation; the point was to make smaller coins available to make them more affordable to collectors. But the law’s text is clear; intent is irrelevant.

If you want a platinum coin to be the answer, it’s easy to close the law books right there. But that would also mean that Congress accidentally delegated all its power over the national debt to the mint’s director. That is absurd on its face, and also violates the U.S. Supreme Court’s “major questions” doctrine, which holds that if a federal agency asserts that Congress delegated power over an issue of major national significance, courts should “hesitate before concluding that Congress meant to confer such authority.”

There are practical problems, too. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen called the coin “a gimmick” and suggested that the Fed might not even accept the deposit. Moreover, the idea that the government could just add a trillion dollars to the money supply with no ill effects makes a lot less sense in 2023, when the government flooded the economy with cash and what followed was the highest inflation in 40 years.

» READ MORE: Breaching the debt limit would be ‘economic catastrophe,’ top economist says

But even if it were legal, the “gimmick” would do nothing to correct our addiction to spending money we don’t have. The recent spike in inflation is just a foretaste of what will come if the United States does not get its finances in order. We have survived, thus far, because other countries are nearly as profligate, and the dollar is still seen as the safest currency in the world. We are living on our reputation, but reputations can change.

Democrats have not cared about deficit spending for years, and many Republicans only pretend to do so. Members of Congress want to tell the folks back home of all the benefits they secured. None of them wants to talk about the costs. Instead, they do what so many of us do: search for that “one weird trick” to solve all our problems. A loophole within a loophole gives us free money — nothing to worry about!

None of this solves the underlying problem. Borrowing more or minting more will create inflation and still leave us broke. Democrats and Republicans in Congress need to look for grown-up solutions that will involve some unpopular spending cuts and maybe some even more unpopular tax or tariff increases.

There is no trick to solve our insolvency, weird or otherwise. Coin or no coin, lawmakers must fix this themselves.