Does the USA have UNLIMITED ABILITY to pay any debt
by creating however much money is required?
The present and future ability of the USA to pay any debt of any magnitude, denominated in US Dollars, is unlimited.
Yes, it's true that the US can do what Germany did in the 1920s and print enough currency to pay its debt.
No, it's not true that the US can do what Germany did in the 1920s.
It's true if I amend the above:
Yes, it's true that the US can do what Germany did in the 1920s and print enough currency to pretend to pay its debt.
I.e., it
pretended to pay its debt, and the USA today could do the same, with its "unlimited ability to pay any debt of any magnitude" by creating the needed currency, as Germany did. What's the difference?
Germany's liability under the Treaty of Versailles wasn't denominated in German Marks, but in gold - which is one reason why it was a disaster for the German economy.
But that's irrelevant to your point that the U.S. can run up all the debt it wants to and repay it by printing the necessary currency, as Germany did. Nevermind the nitpicking details exactly how Germany printed that money --- who cares how they did it? Do you want to make an issue out of what brand of printing presses they used?
Your point that there is unlimited ability to run up debt and print currency to repay it is just as true for the U.S.A. today as it was for Germany. Of course it didn't really work, but that doesn't mean they couldn't do it and then claim the debt was paid, just as the U.S. today could do that. -- (that's
"could" not
"should").
The spending also didn't go into German infrastructure, but instead went into the economies of France, Britain and the USA. Which boomed.
You can give your source if you wish -- not sure of your facts here. If you're saying that in the 1920s Germany paid off a significant part of its debt in gold = real payment of debt, to the allies, then that's different than I thought. I'm skeptical if this is true, but if you have sources saying this, I'll believe it.
Nevertheless, my point about Germany is that they tried to pay much of their obligations by just "printing" money, not by paying in gold. And this did not work, and so later, many decades later, they began paying it for real.
But back in the 1920s they did try to pay much of it by "printing" the money, which did not work. But in the same way it would not work for the U.S. today to just "print" money and pay it to bondholders, in order to get rid of its debt. So the 2 cases are analogous. In both cases it cannot really work as a way to pay debt. Perhaps the U.S. could do it and claim it's legitimate and tell the bondholders to shove it. And those bondholders would be shafted. However, it's still not practical, because then the U.S. could never again sell bonds, so it's still essentially as futile and illegitimate as what Germany did in the 1920s. So the analogy is correct, even though the 2 situations are not exactly the same.
The point is that it's nonsensical for you to say the U.S. can simply run up all the debt it wants to, without limit, and has an endless supply of currency to pay for it because it has endless money-creation ability. In practice it does not, and so it's nutty for anyone to speak this way about today's U.S. debt (that the U.S. has "unlimited ability" to pay any amount, through money creation).
It would not be "zero-effort for a nation to "produce" their own fiat "gold certificates" (just declared as worth a ton of gold) and pay these for anything they want to buy", any more than it would be zero-effort for you to do the same. Nobody would accept such meaningless certificates unless they had good reason to believe they were backed by actual physical gold. Commodity money is irrelevant to the discussion anyway, as nobody sane still uses gold as money.
Whatever -- it sounds like now you're retracting your earlier point:
The present and future ability of the USA to pay any debt of any magnitude, denominated in US Dollars, is unlimited.
This is incorrect, you're now saying. As a practical matter the USA has no such ability. Just as Germany had no ability to do such a thing, though it pretended to. And no country today, U.S. or any other, can presume to do such a thing, pretending it has such power "to pay any debt of any magnitude" by creating however much currency. So now we agree.
That you don't understand this goes a long way to explaining why you're so woefully wrong about the entire topic.
"woefully"? Is that a lot?
Suppose I inscribe your parable on the wall, or stone tablets, and recite it 1000 times a day:
___________________________________________________________________
"The present and future ability of the USA to pay any debt of any magnitude, denominated in US Dollars, is unlimited."
_____________________________________________________
Do you think putting it to music would help?