> The USA is unusual in that it is possibly the only economic powerhouse that is largely self-sufficient in most regards Hardly - the US could not maintain its

> The USA is unusual in that it is possibly the only economic powerhouse that is largely self-sufficient in most regards Hardly - the US could not maintain its current economy and standard-of-living as an autarky. The US is only able to maintain its current standard-of-living because of the massive amounts of work being down outside the country. Manufacturing in China is an easy example, but not the only one. > The world has much more to lose than we do should we should to inflate our way out of debt. Not really. Through a number of effects (both direct and indirect), if we were to try and inflate our way out of debt of this magnitude, we would tank our economy in the short- and medium-term, just the same way Germany, Zimbabwe, and Thailand did[0]. Those economies did recover in the longer run, but not without serious repercussions in between, and it can literally take multiple generations just to get back to the starting point, to say nothing of recovering the same global standing. There is no way the US would want to regress to the sort of economy that this would involve. It would be a total economic disaster. [0] This would be true even before we took into account the effect of no longer being the de facto global reserve currency (which would no longer be the case if we started printing hyperinflation-levels of money).