We Can Always Print Money to Do That

“The United States can pay any debt it has because we can always print money to do that. So there is zero probability of default.” — Alan Greenspan, August 7, 2011

Is Mr Greenspan the greatest troll alive?  Following this quote, we can only hope that’s the case.

It’s certainly true that we could just print more and more and MORE money to pay offthe government’s $14 trillion+ debt.  Actually, we wouldn’t even need to physically print anything — we’d just add a few zeros to some balance sheets here and there and then set up a some wire transfers to our various lenders.  Voila!  Problem solved.  Remind me again why we had that whole debate last week?

The difficulty here — and presumably the reason why we haven’t taken advantage of this ostensibly simple solution already — is that this would cause massiveovernight inflation, probably collapse the dollar, and generally wreak havoc on the world’s economy.

See, whenever you just print huge quantities of money based on nothing, this results in devaluation, or inflation, of the unit of currency. The effect of the very policy Mr. Greenspan recommends may be clearly seen in the history of our money’s value over the course of the last 100 years of the Federal Reserve’s print-happy ways.  The dollar’s worth has declined to less than five cents of what it was at the beginning of the 20th Century.

Basically:  making more money out of thin air = less value per piece of money.

Read this post in it’s entirety on Bonnie Kristian’s website

Coins can change the economy

Tell me the last time you used change to purchase something. It could be a hotdog, a pack of paper, a plate, a CD, or anything else. Is there even a time in your life when you purchased something with just coins? The last time I can think of was when I lived in Germany. That leads me to the main point of this post.

Citizens of the United States, as a whole, need to use coins more often than they currently do or face more economic consequences.

Now Lindsay Lohan isn’t known for her economic policy but she has a point. The treasury prints thousand of dollars a day. Paper money is very flimsy and easily degradable. Therefore the treasury has to constantly spend money in order to provide for the growing population and to replace the old currency. However, it is mainly just to help with the U.S. debt.

Now, let’s move to coins. Most Americans put coins in a jar and save them until they have enough to trade them in for paper money. If we used, or even had, a legitimate system of one and two dollar coins, similar to the Euro, our economy would instantly see a change. We could probably get rid of the one dollar bill and I am sure that it is possible to even establish a five-dollar coin and get rid of the five-dollar bill.

Just think about it. I challenge you to go to your wallet or purse and go through your money. Then go to wherever you keep your change. Check the dates on both.

The oldest dollar bill I found was 2003. Good luck finding anything above a one-dollar bill from earlier than 2000. It is nearly impossible.

The first coin I pulled out was from 1976. Point proven? I think so