A Christian Liberal is NOT an oxymoron.

Posted by XT on November 14th, 2008 in US News

Rasmussen reports that 73% of Americans fear the government running out of money. Look, if we were going to run out of money, then the debacle in Iraq would have done it already.

Take a look at this chart:

Understand that almost any appearance on the chart at all means that we are spending more than we are bringing in that year. If you look at the center of the timeline, you can see that we stopped adding to our debt – the total of all of our yearly deficits minus payments on principle – sometime in 2000. We then began adding to it again in 2001.

The government creates money. It is impossible for the government to run out of money. The only way it could would be if we were still on a precious metal backing. Since our money is only backed by the promise of the government, the government can continue to promise us that our money supply will grow to an infinite level.

Such an action is not without reaction, of course. Everytime our money supply grows faster than our economy, the relative value of our money declines. Think of a dollar bill being a promised share of the total economy. If the economy stagnates and more dollars are created, your relative share is much less.

But we don’t run out. We just experience inflation. Not that inflation is painless or nothing to worry about – with hundreds of billions being tossed out, it’s going to bite us hard. But the fear that we will “run out” is totally false.

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