Inflation is a government policy. It is a method to deflate the real value of government debt. Like many government policies, unintended consequences generate

Inflation is a government policy. It is a method to deflate the real value of government debt. Like many government policies, unintended consequences generate headlines about how one policy negatively affects part of a society that another policy is working to protect. At a macro level, government debt can only be resolved two ways: increase taxes to meet maturing obligations; reduce the real value of the obligations via inflation (and/or a combination of the two). Future economist will have two national debt policies to analyze: Germany (with its constitutional low-debt mandate) and US which discovered over time that it could issue debt at far greater amounts than previous economist ever thought possible.