[muawiyah]

It's called "monetizing the national debt". Alexander Hamilton created the process although a term for it was not devised until just after WWII.

It's as American as mother and apple pie.

[Jason_b]

Even the aristocratic Alexander Hamilton thought the debt should be retired periodically. Periods of a small national debt he thought would be a blessing. His idea of a national debt, still, existed within a monetary framework that took for granted that the basis of real money is gold and silver coin. He would have been baffled by the Federal Reserve System model and hardly created it under a different name at an earlier time, but nice try. Thomas Jefferson; however, is spinning in his grave over the existence of the Federal Reserve and our burden of the very unpayable perpetual debt he warned us about.