That’s what I said. Printing the money comes with peril. There are some differences though depending on how it is implemented. Grabbing the cash has an immediately depressive effect on the economy and of course makes you immediately poorer. Printing the money at once would in theory be the same, though in practice it would be somewhat indiscriminate and unpredictable, sort of like how QE seems to have a disproportionately larger effect on real estate values (though this is just correlation, not sure how much is the cause but it seems like a reasonable hypothesis to me).
In its favor, printing the money over time offers an offsetting benefit of population growth. Again it would be unpredictable and harder to quantify because of all kinds of other macroeconomic factors over time, but a growing population requires a growing money supply. So if I had to choose one, I’d choose the printing press. I’d actually choose printing press over taxes too. Instead of taxing the people print the money, and the ensuing inflation becomes the tax. And the reason I like this better is because every citizen will feel the effect of inflation and ultimately every citizen will insist upon transparency, efficiency and fiscal restraint.
I never really understood taxation in the modern world except as a tool for control and power. It is so wildly inefficient to the point of absurdity especially with a government so heavily and directly involved in the economy as regulator, buyer of goods and services, and employer. It is a most obvious negative feedback loop when you consider that government employees pay taxes to fund the payroll of government employees. I am absolutely not in favor of taxing wealth, but taxing income is insidious because the human condition requires that we work to provide and the social construct requires that we work within the currency system. Taxing our wages is a tremendous friction applied against the human nature itself. Furthermore, taxing income serves as a form of protection for wealth by making competition much harder to succeed. Any business with assets paid for and cash on hand is in a far superior position to an upstart competitor that is hindered by the taxes imposed on its profits and the inability to expense investment in its enterprise. In the days when gold and silver was used as currency taxes made more sense, but today when currency is a fiction build on faith there is no reason for taxation at all. And today we have the worst of it all - we tax, we print, and we borrow. It is the most asinine situation to be in, and the politicians are so stuck in their little worlds that there is nobody who can stop the madness.
Sorry for getting carried away :-) Its a Friday.
In theory. In practice, the government will protect it's own with automatic pay raises to offset their losses.