Economy
Can Government Print Unlimited Cash?
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Can Government Print Unlimited Cash?

Modern Monetary Theory — upon which socialism rests — says that government can print as much money as it wants without consequence, if it’s done right. Not true! ...
Charles Scaliger

Recently President Biden unveiled his latest spending initiative, a $2 trillion infrastructure spending plan chock-full of longtime wish-list items of the Left, including massive spending to “electrify” the entire federal vehicle fleet and a large proportion of the nation’s school buses, steps to reduce carbon emissions, and the creation of a “Civilian Climate Corps.” Ostensibly, this is just another big spending cure-all in the grand tradition of FDR, LBJ, Clinton, and Obama, to be paid for by tax hikes and other impositions  on big corporations — measures that supposedly will pay for the plan over the next 10 years or so. 

In reality, of course, every clear-headed American knows exactly what will happen: Any additional revenues garnered by this latest round of tax hikes on America’s most productive will be squandered by the federal government, as estimates for all of Biden’s new pie-in-the-sky proposals suffer from the usual inefficiencies and unanticipated cost overruns. In the end, the Biden infrastructure boondoggle will simply pile a couple of trillion more dollars onto the national debt, and the usual hand-wringing over the need to impose yet more taxes and create more “stimulus” programs will commence anew. We’ve seen this same show so many times that the predictability borders on cliché. Yet we are fast approaching a point of fiscal and financial no return, a day of reckoning when we are forced to pay the price for decades of irresponsible spending, borrowing, and printing money.

At the time of this writing, the official national debt of the United States stands well in excess of $28 trillion, with an additional million accruing every minute or so. Divvied up among all U.S. taxpayers, the debt amounts to a staggering $224,000 per person. At the same time, the gross domestic product barely surpasses $21 trillion, while the average personal debt per citizen stands at $64,000. These figures tell an increasingly ominous tale, yet, immersed as America has become in the mounting rivalry with Communist China, the stubborn coronavirus pandemic, and the increasingly acrimonious social, political, and cultural divide among Americans themselves, concerns about the skyrocketing national debt have been largely set aside. Some in government and the academy — the devotees of a new economic doctrine called “modern monetary theory” — now assure us that government debt is not the apocalyptic crisis we once thought, and that there is no cause for alarm.

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