“The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.”

I’m old enough to recall the Whip Inflation Now campaign, all shiny buttons and rhetoric, meanwhile consumer prices continued to rise closer to 20 percent per year. 
Alan Greenspan as the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors recalled thinking “This is unbelievably stupid” when the Whip Inflation Now campaign was first presented to the (Ford Administration) White House.  

It took until after the Ford administration for politicians to understand (ala Milton Friedman) that to reduce the money supply would help control inflation. 

it doesn’t have to contain a trillion dollars worth of platinum or anything like that.

A coin that contained that much platinum would weigh about forty million pounds.

Hmm…this might be the plan all along…”The Poison Pill Job”. 

You mean “DIE!, Hard Currency” right?

I still think that getting physical stuff from China in exchange for worthless pieces of paper is a good deal.

To begin with, the scale of a debt itself is irrelevant. A person could go through their life in constant possession of a mortgage that was many times their annual income and never feel destitute, if the payments on said string of mortgages didn’t represent a tremendous opportunity cost relative to their income- regardless of if that income is in the form of loans, or gifts, or paychecks, or whatever.. What matters is the cost of servicing it- and that’s a value that we have access to in the form of the federal budget (debt service is pretty far down in the scheme of things) and in the form of the interest rates that lenders are able to demand from the Treasury- and they are pleasantly low. And when I say low, I mean *negative.* Go look yourself. The global consensus is that the American government’s ability to levy taxes from a nation filled with productive infrastructure and people is so high, relative to other group’s ability to raise money, that the owners of the Big Pool of Money are willing to accept a minor loss as a minder’s fee for their cash. Yes, that’s right, it is presently *profitable* for the Treasury to lend money.

The story is essentially the same for inflation. There’s this constant freakout about inflation ripping through the middle class when the data at hand suggests that inflation is *lower than it should be.* Yes, that’s right, there’s a level of inflation where things work better, because savings aren’t always good (that’s usually where personal level grandma economics just melts down.) Sometimes. having too much saved switches from being a prudent regulator against random economic fluctuations, rising and falling to smooth out the eddies, and becomes a sink, where economic activity goes and never returns. The only way to get the money out of the sink is to tell its owners that there are better places for it to go, and you do that by making it less valuable relative to having it in the form of things or investment, and you do that by printing money- and the data suggests that that’s about where we are.

The reason that a rising debt can matter isn’t that the debt collector is suddenly going to come around and repo everyone’s car- it’s much better for everyone if they can keep driving said car to work, and we have armies for that too. It’s that it decreases the eagerness of the owners of the Big Pool to lend more, because, effectively, of concerns that the people that got there first will get paid first. But once again, that’s a fear we can assess in the form of the interest rate, and it’s fine- and go figure, when the US is the world’s largest economy and has some of the lowest tax rates in the civilized world, the proportion by which you could raise taxes in the future to pay everyone coming to the trough before you’d have an expectation of substantial economic damage is pretty wide.

Unless of course the body controlling said tax rates views keeping them low as a moral imperative disconnected from the practical (and frequently moral) benefits of having tax revenues, and the public knowledge of that tendency kept people from coming to the trough at all….

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We’re out to arrest them in the UK. If you find them, we want to extradite them. 

Inflation is far, far better than deflation. A little inflation is just fine in a functioning economy, but deflation causes a downward spiral that destroys economies.

Point being, we can certainly afford a slightly higher inflation than we have now.