Why cant the national govt just print more money to pay off debts and fund programs?

Answer 1

Printing more money means higher the inflation (means too much money chasing too few goods) and eventually money's purchasing power ( Price rising is nothing but fall in value of money: means with the same amount of money you will be able to buy less) will be reduced so in any case it will never make people rich unless you print money by yourself and invest first in the market to acquire resources which is illegal and called counterfeiting of money.

Answer 2

Well, if you print more money then the actual cost of money goes down because it is now more common. Let's say you have a dollar, which is worth a dollar. And then you make another dollar. Now each dollar would only be worth 50 cents.

Answer 3

Money is only valuable if YOU believe that it is valuable.

If I live in a cardboard box, own only the clothes on my back, and give you a piece of paper that entitles you to "Momo dollars" in enough quantity to buy a new leather jacket. Would you believe that the Momo dollars were worthwhile? Do you think I, or anyone else, would give you a leather jacket in exchange for the piece of paper?

NOPE!

We can print all the paper money we want, but if there isn't something of REAL VALUE behind it (gold, silver, diamonds, whatever) then NOBODY is going to be willing to accept our paper money in exchange for whatever we wanted to buy from them.

You'll only accept my $5500 in cash for your used car if you honestly believe my $5500 will buy you enough stuff to be equal to the value of your used car your giving up in exchange for my $5500 in paper money.

Answer 4

Printing money doesn't create wealth.

The United States has a monetary system that is not back by, well, anything. So printing more money just creates more of it, but it doesn't solve any problems. What it does is decreases the value of a dollar. So, if the value of our dollar decreases in relation to the value of currency in other countries, it takes a greater quantity of money for us to pay off our debts.

Plus, what kind of system is that? If we just keep printing money we will eventually be wheeling money into grocery stores in barrows just to buy a loaf of bread and some milk.

This would devalue our money, which is bad. But it also would be a temporary fix to a larger problem.

Answer 5

That would lead to inflation.

think about it. I'll use an extreme example.

if the banks printed out trillions of 100 dollar bills, and everybody had a lot of them, what would be the value behind them?

if everywhere we walked, all over the street, all over our tables, there were 100 dollar bills, then nobody would need any more of them. They would be like pennies.

the value would decrease, similar to how a fraction decreases.

1/2 is 0.5

if we kept increasing the denominator, the fraction would keep decreasing.

Answer 6

Printing more money does not solve economic problems, it increases them by increasing inflation.

Printed money has to have something to back it, money is a promissory note.

Answer 7

if they do that the economy would go bad. (even though its already bad)