The problem is that printing money isn't even necessarily a bad thing. It can be used like a carrot on a stick, except you can just pull that stick carrot out o

The problem is that printing money isn't even necessarily a bad thing. It can be used like a carrot on a stick, except you can just pull that stick carrot out of thin air. When used wisely this leads to a multiplicative effect, where you use one carrot to coax a farmer into growing 10 carrots. This is what most functional economies do, and why the US has been able to continually print money since forever. The problem is when you forget that those "stick carrots" aren't real carrots until you harvest the real ones from the ground, and treat them as if they are the same. They are not. Stick carrots are regular carrots borrowed from the future, and must be paid back.