The United States can pay any debt it has because we can always print money to do that. So there is zero probability of default.
To own the dominant, or only, newspaper in a mid-sized American city was, for many decades, a kind of license to print money. In the Internet age, however, no one has figured out how to rescue the newspaper in the United States or abroad.
All the states are required, either by constitution or by statute, to have balanced budgets - they're not able to print money. So they have to focus on establishing priorities.
We print money. The people that print the money is actually us. The government of the United States of America. By its very nature, we control that, and this system is there as representation of us.
If you print money like in Zimbabwe... the purchasing power of money goes down, and the standards of living go down, and eventually, you have a civil war.
When you print money, the money does not flow evenly into the economic system. It stays essentially in the financial service industry and among people that have access to these funds, mostly well-to-do people. It does not go to the worker.
I am pretty sure central banks will continue to print money, and the standards of living for people in the western world, not just in America, will continue to decline because the cost of living increases will exceed income. The cost of living will also go up because all kinds of taxes will increase.
When the government runs out of lenders, it can do something that households are forbidden to do: print money.
One-newspaper towns are not good because all the surviving newspaper does is print money. They make 25 percent on their money every year, and if they go down to 22 percent, they start laying people off.
The government, of course, will print money to bail out the banks' uncovered casino bets, but not to bail out the elderly from the theft of their funds.
