Cruz Comes Under Heavy Attack For Advocating the Gold Standard

http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2015/10/29/3717416/ted-cruz-gold-standard-debate/



At Wednesday night’s GOP presidential debate, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) called for returning to a policy idea that died in 1933 and has gone unmourned ever since.

“We need sound money,” Cruz said when asked about Federal Reserve policy by CNBC’s Rick Santelli. “And I think the Fed should get out of the business of trying to juice our economy and simply be focused on sound money and monetary stability, ideally tied to gold.”
American money hasn’t been based on the price of gold since the early months of Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency. Returning to a “gold standard,” as the policy was known, would send the broader economy into the kind of jittery and deadly tremors usually seen only in lab mice who’ve been fed cocaine.
The idea of “sound money,” as the libertarian crowd that worships the gold standard prefers to call it, is that it takes away the Fed’s ability to manage the value of a dollar. The supposed benefit of this is that your money’s worth is more real because it is pegged to a shiny, rare metal.