All right, forget about a budget. In fact, even forget about money. Money isn't all that real; the real economy is about stuff. The economy has a maximum cap

All right, forget about a budget. In fact, even forget about money. Money isn't all that real; the real economy is about stuff. The economy has a maximum capacity for a given set of workers, resources, and technology. The basic economic question is, which stuff is going to be produced, and where is it going to go? Who's going to get it, and what are they going to do with it? In a market economy, we use money to organize and manage that. But if we print more money, that doesn't create any more stuff at all. If the government is printing more money, two things are happening: The government is buying more of the stuff that's being produced, and the price of stuff is going up (because there's more money chasing the same amount of stuff). That means that everybody who's not the government is getting less of the stuff. Now, that can be fine, if the government is doing things with the stuff that are going to pay society back down the road. If not, though, the government is just using up more stuff, leaving everybody else with less stuff, and causing inflation into the bargain. So the question is: What made up that debt of 100% of GDP? Was it good investments that are going to pay the UK back? Or was it just waste?