He’s an idiot

I hope he doesn’t breed.

It sounds like your friend has been exposed in a rudimentary way to Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), some of the tenets of which are controversial but which makes some solid conceptual points.

One of those more plausible points is that a sovereign currency issuer (like the US, which is the sole issuer of the US dollar), by definition, creates the currency it issues. The federal reserve creates dollars not by taxing or borrowing, but by entering zeroes into a spreadsheet and then spending (or lending) those dollars into the economy, which are only then available to be taxed or borrowed. This is the STAB (spend, then tax and borrow) model.

This differs fundamentally from all other users of the currency, including households (like you and me) as well as US cities and states, which even if they have the power to tax are not currency issuers, and thus have to operate on a TABS (tax and borrow, then spend) model. (They typically can’t run a deficit either and have to balance their budget, unlike the federal government.)

Now, just because conceptually the federal government doesn’t need taxes in order to spend or create money doesn’t mean it’s a good idea! In particular, it may cause inflation. But once we realize that the purpose of taxation is to control the amount of money in circulation, rather than being strictly necessary, it reveals that the limits to spending by a currency issuer are practical (such as how much we can spend before inflation creeps up) rather than conceptual.

One immediate upshot is that if there is enough slack in the real economy to allow spending that wouldn’t create inflation, there’s nothing in principle stopping a currency issuer from doing just that. Another upshot is that this conceptual model gives the lie to all those naysayers who claim that we can’t have nice things because “there’s no money.” In practice we might not do it because we don’t want hyperinflation, but that’s a very different reason from it being impossible in principle.

Finding the money is a good movie about exactly this. How we think about taxes is actually pretty wrong in the US

“Just printing money” to cover a government’s operational expenses is an express ticket to rampant hyperinflation that devalues said currency very quickly. Various cut-rate regimes all over the world have tried that tactic many times throughout history and it’s always wound up with the same result.

So needless to say, as insane as the current monetary policy in the US may or may not be, that’s certainly not how it works now.

Printing money causes inflation. Inflation is effectively a flat tax on anyone who has dollars. Which is to say it disproportionately impacts the poor.

So while printing money would be one possible way of getting rid of taxes, it’s absolutely a stupid idea.

It’s a lot more complicated than that but I’m not an expert maybe one will help out but here’s my shot

1. Congress allocates funds for stuff and the treasury has to produce the money.
2. The treasury produces money by selling government bonds and collecting taxes. (This is the government borrowing money)
3. The federal reserve prints money and buys those government bonds to manage inflation (but they can’t buy them from the treasury they gotta buy them on the open market)

So if there wasn’t enough taxes to pay for everything the federal reserve prints the money to purchase government bonds which ultimately transfers newly printed money to the government to spend (ngl I’m not sure how exactly the new money gets to the treasury when they can only buy the bonds on the market)

This increases inflation and whatnot because now there’s more money floating around so it’s worth less causing the federal reserve to raises interest rates and sell + the government bonds get cheaper and people buy them reducing the money supply against inflation

Your friend is mostly correct but the printed money is for the billionaires not for peasants.

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