That depends on what happens with those dollars. I guess you can best sum it up like this: Printing money is not inflationary, but spending money can be. Thos

That depends on what happens with those dollars. I guess you can best sum it up like this: Printing money is not inflationary, but spending money can be. Those 14 trillion USD in government debt is held in bonds precisely because those wealthy enough to own them do not want to spend them. So if, all of a sudden, the Fed prints a lot of dollar bills to pay the US debt, what this really means at an operational level is that they print those dollar bills to buy treasuries on the open market and/or buy directly from the government. This simply means that the demand for treasuries increases, which drives up the price of treasuries, which is equivalent to driving down the interest rate on treasuries. To sum it up: if the Fed does what you say, the interest rates will drop further closer to zero, but that's pretty much all that will happen. Now if you think that decreasing interest rates can have secondary effects, then we can talk about those. But given that the interest rate is almost 0% already anyway, it seems unlikely that a small downward change would have a big economic impact. Perhaps you're confusing paying back the debt with actual spending. Paying back the debt is simply an asset/liability swap that doesn't change anybody's wealth, and therefore cannot have inflationary effects. Actual spending is something else, and can be inflationary - though in the current economic climate, you could probably increase government spending significantly (by a trillion or so per year) without creating inflationary trouble.