Are California's IOUs an Unconstitutional Bill of Credit?

California is broke. It's going to start issuing IOUs to creditors. Article One, Section 10 of the United States Constitution provides: "No State shall ... emit Bills of Credit []."

Is an IOU a "bill of credit"?

I don't know. Do you?

Comments

[Patrick]

According to Story's Commentaries on the Constitution, at Sec. 1362, they sure sound like bills of credit.

[KipEsquire]

http://www.law.cornell.edu/anncon/html/art1frag93_user.html#art1_hd282

[KingofthePaupers]

Jct: There’s nothing wrong with small denomination California State IOUs if I or anyone else can pay their taxes with them. When Argentina’s government workers were faced with cuts, their unions talked 6 state governments into paying them with small-denomination state bonds which could be used to pay for state services and taxes and which everyone accepted as useful currency. Best of all, when the local currency is pegged to the Time Standard of Money (how many dollars per unskilled hour child labor) Hours earned locally can be intertraded with other timebanks globally! In 1999, I paid for 39/40 nights in Europe with an IOU for a night back in Canada worth 5 Hours.
U.N. Millennium Declaration UNILETS Resolution C6 to governments is for a time-based currency to restructure the global financial architecture. See my banking systems engineering analysis at http://youtube.com/kingofthepaupers
Too bad California State IOUs won’t be accepted in payment for state taxes and services like state bonds were in Argentina. Too bad California State IOUs will be denominated too big to use as local currency. Too bad Argentina people were smart enough to avoid the tent-cities catastrophe and California people are too stupid to follow their example.

[wemustbeheard]

Hey King,
You are the epitome of progressive logic.
A law isn't a law unless you agree with it?
You must be smoking that medical marijuana for that
bi-polar delusional thinking.

States are not allowed to print money. If you can pay your freaking taxes with it, it is money. What a fruit cake. Go save a minnow and ruin your best export product, food, in the process.

[KingofthePaupers]

"States are not allowed to print money."

Jct: States are not allowed to save themselves.
And I guess they're not allowed to print bonds either?
As for gratuitously insulting you back because I'm growing new brain cells and it's obvious you're not, your words are now
official for posterity.
Wemustheheard, not with a solution, but with a whine.

[DAVID FRIEDLAND]

The Constitution is clear- these are bills of credit- Art 1 Sec 10 also requires that all debts be repaid in gold or silver coin.
Art. 1

Section 10. No state shall enter into any treaty, alliance, or confederation; grant letters of marque and reprisal; coin money; emit bills of credit; make anything but gold and silver coin a tender in payment of debts; pass any bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law impairing the obligation of contracts, or grant any title of nobility.
David Friedland