The Republican Party plans to call for the creation of a commission that would explore the return of the gold standard, or tying the value of the U.S. dollar to the price of gold, the Financial Times reported on Thursday. Paul Krugman thinks that is "an almost comically (and cosmically) bad idea." The Nobel Prize-winning Princeton economics professor and New York Times columnist wrote in a Sunday blog post that a return to the gold standard would lay waste to an already struggling U.S.