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All of this is just so stupid, it's so unnecessary. There's no reason growth must be correlated with increased debt. The Federal government doesn't need to borrow money for anything, they create their own money. They don't need to go to people and say, "hey, lend me some of your dollars so I can pay for the army, or roads and bridges," they can just make more dollars. The US Federal government is a sovereign currency issuer, they make the money. You wouldn't need to borrow money from your friend if you had a legal money printer at home that could print an infinite number of dollars.
But I know, inflation. Yes, if the Federal government made a bunch of money and went around dropping it out of hot air balloons, inflation would go up. When people get money in their hands they tend to want to spend it, this causes increased demand, supply can't necessarily keep up with the sudden increase in demand and you get inflation. There's a pretty easy solution to this problem: don't print a bunch of money and just hand it out to people. Print it, and use it to fund infrastructure projects or public services. Put some of it in an account that can only be used to make payments to bond holders. I know the infrastructure projects would mean money being put into the hands of the people who work on those projects, but I doubt that would increase the overall inflation rate very much, and if it did you could always just pull back on the infrastructure spending when inflation was high and ramp it back up when the inflation rate goes lower.
When you print money, it devalues all the existing money because there’s more of it but the extra value it generates hasn’t materialised yet.
Guess who owns over half of all the money there is. Imagine how they would feel if you devalued it, and then imagine whose campaigns they would fund next time.
When you borrow money, you create a taxpayer liability that Americans have to work hard to repay, in addition to servicing the debt with interest payments.
Guess who neither pays taxes nor has to work harder to service federal debt. That’s right, and guess who funded your campaign. Are you going to let them down, or make the choice to screw workers a bit more?
Money doesn't have value. Money is just a medium of exchange. It can be anything, a pebble, a shell, a small piece of metal, a piece of paper, or, most commonly today, digits in a computer. Things are what have value. Consumer products and services, raw materials, etc. Money is just a stand-in for those things. Simply increasing the amount of digits in the computer isn't going to suddenly increase prices. What would affect prices is if you transferred a bunch of that newly created money into everyone's checking accounts, all at once. That would lead to inflation, because, as I already said, if you put money into people's hands (or checking accounts) they're going to spend it. This would increase the number of dollars pursuing goods and services, but the amount of goods and services wouldn't increase right away, so there would be more money relative to the same number of things, and prices would go up. So, just don't transfer all of the newly created money into people's checking accounts.
Like I said, put some of it into an account that can only be used to pay bond holders. You know, the people the US Federal government owes all their money to. That money would trickle out of the Treasury department as the Treasury made payments to bond holders, it wouldn't just be some big, sudden cash infusion into the broader economy. The same is true of using the money for Federal infrastructure projects.
I'm not suggesting the Federal government should default on its debt. Not at all. They should pay back bond holders, at interest. All except one: the Federal Reserve. The Federal Reserve doesn't need to be paid back because they're the ones who create the money, and they can manage the creation of the money so that it doesn't lead to too high of inflation.
You have no idea what you're talking about. Stop it.
"The assumption that what currently exists must necessarily exist is the acid that corrodes all visionary thinking."
Thank you for doubling down on it. Next tell us about your perpetual motion machine, followed by that quote of course.
False equivalency.
It's a good thing not everyone is as arrogantly resistant to new possibilities as you, otherwise human progress might cease entirely.
Funny because that's essentially what YOU did. You don't know what you're talking about, so you handwave away people that say that's not how it works, first with your quote and second with "false equivalency". And you miss the point. The whole point is your "idea" is as possible as a perpetual motion machine, except this time with essentially a money glitch.
And you're still at it! "Something something new possibilities!"
Dude you have no idea how it works. And worse is that you have no idea that you have no idea. And it gets even worse when you dismiss everything with your quote. And EVEN worse is that you attack people when they say that's now how it works. Ok that's enough for me. Ciao.
I didn't mean to imply that I think what I'm suggesting is possible in the current system. I should have made that more clear. That's my fault. I understand that what I'm talking about would require significant systemic changes. To you, that might essentially make it impossible, but I don't think that's necessarily true. People made the existing system, there's no reason why people couldn't make a different system.
The relevant context is first Bretton Woods, then Nixon abandoning the gold standard, and the petrodollar arrangement.
Clearly the US dollar needed, and needs, international acceptance if it is to be global reserve currency. This is changing of course, and perhaps the US could abandon the late 20th century economic order entirely in one move as you suggest (more than they already are), but good luck buying stuff from other countries with dollars in that circumstance. What is North Korea's currency worth these days?
One thing I don't understand about inflation is why printing money increases it but borrowing money doesn't.
Either way you all of a sudden have $200 million dollars to spend, why does inflation care if that came from another country? The money is still the same, being spent the same, etc.
Eventually it needs to be paid back but that's not for a very long time so wouldn't inflation happen between now and then anyways?
Let's pretend there are only $100 in our imaginary economy which buys and sells a limited supply of 100 bricks at $1/brick. You ask to borrow $50 to buy 50 bricks, so a lender loans you $50, to be repaid with 10% interest. You work and are paid from the other $50 owned by others. Eventually, you pay back $55 (due to interest). There's still only $100 in the economy throughout this exercise, just the relative proportions owned by people change.
Alternately, the government prints that $50 and gives it to you (this is a gross oversimplification of quantitative easing). Now there are $150 in the system. The brick sellers know the government has done this and that you have more money, so they bump up their prices to $1.50 simply because they want the most money possible. $1 now buys less, 33.3% less.
Spending by 1) borrowing or 2) by increasing the money supply are VERY different things.