After Christmas One's Thoughts Turn To...?

The country is shivering under an increasingly nasty public debate. The debate has been this nasty, in fact, even nastier, in times past. But as the government's role in daily life, and the government's role in our economy, has grown, the tenor of the debate has become more critical, and potentially much more erosive. The days when a President and Congress could debate defense and tariff policy, and be done with it, are over, for better or worse.
We are apparently not printing enough funny money for some folk. Robert J. Schiller, supposedly a reputable economist, writes in the New York Times that the U.S. should consider issuing notes called “trills”. A trill would represent one trillionth of the country's GDP. The government would then pay a quarterly “dividend” equal to one trillionth of the quarterly GDP.
Mr. Shiller is a professor of economics at Yale, so I assume that he is, as my people would say, wicked smart. He considers gross domestic product to be the “national profit”. Professor Shiller suggests that there could be a brisk trade in trills, with their value rising and falling with expectations of the value of GDP. This would be one way to get government directly involved in casino gambling.
I wonder what kind of economist considers the GDP to be the national profit. It doesn't belong to the government, though the government has become a disturbingly, if not suicidally large part of the economy. If I were looking at GDP rigorously, wouldn't I see it as the country's gross receipts? Private companies (at least the ones that want to continue existing) would normally pay dividends based on profit, not gross receipts. One great exception was General Motors, which continued paying dividends even as it hemorrhaged billions of dollars. Those guys all got paid, so I guess they were wicked smart, too.
I also wonder what kind of theory of value Professor Shiller subscribes to. What do you think?
Perhaps what Professor Shiller is really saying is that there is no way out of deficit spending, without completely destroying the country, so here's a bit of flim flam to generate mega bucks, so that we don't have to rein in spending at all. Presumably, foreigners in countries with real economies will buy these things from us. They will buy them, right?
The fact that I don't see the executability of this scheme confirms my limited intelligence. I've been proven stupid before. Being a dumb sailor also made it impossible for me to understand Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman's call for more, and larger stimulus packages, in the face of trillion dollar deficits. Heck, it's not real money – it's just printed paper. No one will notice if we print some more, eh?.
As for trill$ - put me down for a bazillion of 'em, professor. I'm in.