Tuesday, August 09, 2011

Can the U.S. Government pay its debts? Well, who prints dollars?

"Many economists argue, essentially, that the United States isn't going to fail to pay its debts. "The debt is issued in dollars. That means it is payable in dollars. The U.S. government prints dollars," wrote Dean Baker of the liberal Center for Economic and Policy Research Saturday. "This means that if for some reason the government was unable to tax or borrow to raise the money to pay its debt then it could always print it. This may carry a risk of inflation, but S&P is not in the business of making inflation predictions, they are in the business of assessing the likelihood that debt will be repaid."

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/lookout/p-slammed-u-downgrade-160436799.html

http://flavors.me/howard

Posted via email from edge & flow

5 comments:

  1. Anonymous5:17 AM

    Yes, let's print more money and become Argentina.

    ReplyDelete
  2. That's exactly the kind of one-dimensional, bumper sticker thinking that fuels Tea Party ignorance. Life isn't all either/or. Surely we need (and used to have) the subtlety to manage more than one problem at a time.

    The quote acknowledges the issue of inflationary effect, but it's discussing S&P's unjustifiable downgrade.

    S&P is a worthless husk of what it was/should be. It shouldn't be setting monetary policy for the United States.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anonymous7:36 PM

    The downgrade was long overdue. There's nothing simplistic or one-dimensional about my comment. It's quite multi-dimensional and frighteningly accurate. And I resent ad hominen attacks tying me with the tea party. Nobody owns my thinking.

    ReplyDelete
  4. It's not personal Howard. All this says is that bumpersticker sloganeering -- which was, please note, all you offered -- is a Tea Party trademark.

    And what is it, exactly, that is multidimensional about the Argentina crack?That's all I had in front of me when I made my comment, and that's the definition of one dimensional in my world.

    ReplyDelete
  5. P.S. I'm guessing that the Hward v Howard debate must be perplexing at first glance :)

    ReplyDelete

 
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