Why doesn't the U.S. just print up a whole bunch of extra money to pay off its debts?

you can't do that it would cause more inflation everything would start to cost more than it already does the dollar tree stores would soon dissapear.

Greenspan must have been joking. Or else he forgot about what happened when the Treasury tried this trick to pay off the Viet Nam war and LBJ's expensive failures in social engineering. The end of the 1970s saw double-digit inflation. The direct result of this tactic. We should have learned our lesson at that time, and the only reason we got past this was due to generally favorable economic conditions in the 1980s. Which we do not have at this time -- actually, just the opposite. Greenspan must have failed to recall that in the total of human history no government has ever been able to spend themselves out of a debt crisis or a recession.

More money in circulation will cause massive devaluation of the dollar on the world currently market. Those holding US Treasury securities will dump these as fast as they can -- even at a loss. No government will accept any new US securities unless the interest payment is at a near impossible level. ("Here is your ten billion, the interest rate is 50%")

Bartering will become the standard means of exchange; maybe you will be able to get a pound of rice for two hours of yard work. Your bicycle might be worth a bag of flour and a box of raisins. Not the way most of the population might prefer to live.

If the US just printed up a whole bunch of extra money, you would see runaway inflation like you've never seen before. If the government were to double the number of Dollars in circulation, it would cut the value of the Dollar by at least half.

On top of that, I doubt that you would be very happy when you went to the store to buy a loaf of bread to find that the price had just shot up to $17 a loaf.

Hey, great idea.

They can print up hundreds of trillions of dollars and make everyone a millionaire. Then none of us would have to work.

Of course then, there would be no food, because no one would plant or harvest anything. We don't need to work. We're millionaires.

We'd have to import everything and in a few years all that money would be in China. Meanwhile, the food would come into port, but no one is working to unload it or truck it around the country. We don't need to work. We're millionaires.

No more restaurants to eat at. No one would want to cook or wait on tables. We don't need to work. We're millionaires.

There would be no school. No teacher needs to work anymore, so there's no one to teach. Kids will all have to be home schooled, except that there would be no new textbooks. Authors and teachers don't need to work. We're millionaires.

There would be no electricity. No television, no internet, no computers will work. No one wants to work at a power plant. We don't need to work. We're millionaires.

Soldiers won't need to work. China can take us over. We won't even put up a fight.

Yep, great idea.

Just because we print the money, doesn't mean anything. You need something behind the paper, that makes it worth the number printed on it. Such as Gold. The more money that is printed, without the gold to back the less valuable the dollar is.

Paper money is a good part of the national debt. That's why on every bill you have it says federal reserve note. Federal reserve needs to have permission to start the presses and they get that permission when the debt ceiling is raised..

Well, that is already the plan. Comrades Bernanke and Obama already did money printing one and two, aka QE1 and QE2. Probably a certainty now that QE3 is next given the cluelessness of the aforementioned idiots.

Like Germany did in 1930?

You could but the $50 trillion or so money in the US would become worth virtually nothing which would be the end to the US.

This is supposed to be a joke right? If we print more money, the money we print will be worth less.