When I was six I thought I had the worlds financial situation figured out. If we were short on money; simply print more. Just hand out newly minted $100’s to the people and countries who need it.
Of course as I got older I realized it was a really stupid plan. You can’t just print more money like a bad game of Monopoly.
The problem is apparently my six-year-old inner child got a job in politics and he has lots of friends that share the “print more” mentality. Forget about the bad economy for a moment. Printing more money will never work. It is debt plain and simple and it is the taxpayers that will have to pay it back.
Should we incur more debt by literally printing more money and handing it to the people that lost it in the fist place? Sure, why not?! Heck, lets go buy a recovering alcoholic a couple beers while we are at it.
Bail out private companies and have the government take over? Sure, as long as you like Socialism.
Oh, and since we are in such a gift giving mood with our newfound wealth…Fire the old board members but be sure to give them great severance packages in the process! Why not?! I mean if there company had gone under (which was the natural order of things) they wouldn’t have millions in their personal bank accounts [insert shallow tear here].
Perhaps I need to tap into my inner child for some other great ideas that will better mankind…apparently their time has come. Foot Long Pop Tarts. Check. Two-headed Cats. Check. Print a Trillion dollars of what will soon become play money. Check.
Godfather Added: An actual up-to-date explanation about why we can’t print more money can be found here.
About Godfather
Don’t forget the time-machine to keep us 6 years old, and on summer break from school, so we dont have to stop playing.
As for the financial crisis, we dont need to print more money, we just need to write out some checks. I have some if need be…everyone knows, if you have checks, that means there HAS to be money!
Given the Calvin and Hobbes references I am going to guess the Time Machine is made out of a cardboard box?!
Well what else would YOU make it out of??? DUH!
LOL
Just so the young kids don’t get left out…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calvin_and_Hobbes
I just wanted to say this site cracks me up! Great mix of humor and real information.
Thanks
I remember telling my mother once, “Well, if you don’t have any money, just write a check for it.” I got a good lesson that day that I’ve never forgotten. Too bad others think you can just write a check (or print more money).
Lets see if I have this right. Homeowners borrowed money they couldn’t afford using equity it turns out the didn’t have to back the loan. Result? Defaulted mortgages. Now the government has the solution to bail out the bad mortgages using money they don’t have backed by ???? GOOD GRIEF CHARLIE BROWN!!
Great site, BTW, I have some 1920’s German Marks we could use, they’re still good right?
I would save them Dave…you never know!
Thanks for the comment!
Finances are such a huge topic to discuss. I guess that I would start by saying that we need to eliminate credit and start using what we have. Although that is good for individuals, I’m talking about the governemnt. It’s really tough to stay out of debt when you have debt factories running full tilt. The federal reserve banks have presidents who basically do whatever they want. They only need 10% of what they loan out. In other words, if I had ten bucks, I could loan you a hundred. Here’s the kicker, though. . . the banks “loan” one another money. Imagine that. You can see where this goes. I’ll loan you 100, you loan the next guy 1000, he loans another 10K, etc. The really scary part is that it’s on a scale of billions of dollars. Credit is being fabricated like domain names! It’s ridiculous, and we’re probably not going to dig ourselves out before another giant financial crisis like the depression. We might have to start referring to it as something other than THE depression if we’re not careful.
Rather than have tax just have the government print more money to use for the tax. Simple but never going to happen because of inflation, but it wouldnt really affect it.
Printing more more only = debt if, as a nation, you’re a significant net borrower. Oh that’s right, the America is.
It doesn’t matter whether your currency’s play money or real money. If your banking system has the credibility of a 6 year old Monopoly gatekeeper, (and America’s does) you end up up the same creek, missing the same paddle.
You are giving ideas of printing money individually, people printing money in an economical crisis, it doesn’t work in every country is illegal, but governments can do it, nobody control them, unless they run out of prime material, ink, or machinery break down, they can amount money as they please. Even they can buy notes made in China or North Korea
Nice read, unfortunately if that was the case, printing more money and handing money over willy nilly would be like shooting yourself in the foot.
Hi there,
In my opinion, we have to accept the fact that we can print money cos we own the dollar printing machine. Now as a whole, does the economy need more money? Maybe it does not. But if we look at micro finances, we’ll discover that personal disposable income is deteriorating due to inflation and maybe insufficient wages. So to me, the economy may have sufficient money supply to finance its activities, but the wealth is not fairly distributed among the masses. The rich are hoarding up all the cash while the economically-meek are struggling to make ends meet. That is why you will see enough supply of money in the economy but you still hear people complaining. The govt needs to put more money in the working class and increase taxes on the super rich if they opt to not print more money. On corporate bailouts, it is better for the economy if these corporations are bailed out with new money in order to save thousands or millions of economic lives. But, ‘old money’ from these ‘cash warlords’ must be taken back in or order to balance out the distribution of money. Hey, it’s just my lousy 2 cents.