[blam]

"But the solution won’t work, because they’ll have to keep printing lots of money to do it, which means continued increases in inflation, which means more stimulus, more money printing, more inflation, etc."

Been doing it for decades....that's how we got there. Just 'kick the can a little bit further down the road'.

[Boogieman]

Yeah, and we got away with it because of 2 things mainly:

1. We were using some clever financial trickery to “postpone” inflationary effects, hoping that increases in GDP would catch up in time to offset and negate those effects, or at least to make sure that the current politicians left office by that time to avoid blame.

2. As the world’s reserve currency, we were essentially able to “spread the misery around” to everyone else. If everyone’s prices were rising as fast as ours, at least inflation was not causing us to also lose our competitiveness internationally. Even China was silly enough to peg the price of their currency to ours, which helped hide some of their economic weakness, but in the end, it will be a move they will definitely regret.