Well with fiat money we do that basically all the time and don’t have a run away inflation
Comment on Modern Monetary Theory: Musk Edition
Furbag@pawb.social 5 days ago
Ok Elon, could you point to just one historical example of a government printing money and a deflationary trend happening as a result? Just one example should be easy to come up with if he’s so confident that printing money will not cause inflation, but rather deflation.
DeadDigger@lemmy.zip 5 days ago
Furbag@pawb.social 5 days ago
We do print money and we have steady inflation, but inflation is still inflation.
A lot of people seem to be clinging onto the wrong concept here. Nobody is arguing against the reality that the government can print money to pay it’s own debts or solve an economic crisis, because they obviously do it all the time and sometimes the damage done from the inflationary reaction caused by printing more money is significantly preferable to what the alternative could have been (severe recession, economic collapse, etc.).
The point I am trying to make is that Elon is making a specific claim that printing money has a deflationary effect, which I have personally never seen evidence of, no economist has ever seriously theorized, and flies in the fact of common sense and human nature.
calcopiritus@lemmy.world 5 days ago
This is actually true though. Basically every country has done it.
If printing money results in enough value created, there is no inflation.
Of course, you have to create a lot of value per money printed, which no country has achieved. And that’s where taxes come in and fill the gap.
Many of the “economic miracles” involved printing a lot of money. But since their value output increased so fast, (and again, taxes) they experienced little inflation.
It is theoretically possible to print money without taxes and not have inflation. That would be more than a miracle though. If you get even more efficient with money, even deflation would happen.
It’s the same reasoning behind debt. Debt is “bad” because you have to pay more than what you were paid. But if you are smart with that money and create more money from it, you can pay back the debt (including interests) and get some extra money for yourself.