(06-16-2017, 08:15 AM)Byron LeftTown Wrote: How does the government go "bankrupt" when it can print as much of the world currency as it needs?  The world has not used "money" in many years.  We exclusively use privately-issued debt instruments as "money".

What do you think would happen if we printed money to pay our debts?   We're talking 20 or, maybe by then, 30 or more, trillions of dollars of US government debt.  

That much money printing would devalue the currency and cause inflation.   Inflation would lead people to demand more interest in exchange for buying our debt.   No one is going to buy a bond that pays 2% when inflation is 4%.   So the government will have to offer more interest in order to sell the bonds.   More interest on the bonds means a greater chunk of the federal budget will go to interest, which will make the deficits and the debt much much worse and the result will be the same.   At some point, we will either have completely out of control runaway inflation, or government default, and probably government default anyway. 

We cannot avoid bankruptcy and default by printing money.    It doesn't work.

The only solution is to start NOW to solve this problem. The longer we wait, the worse it will be.

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