Actually, that's not true.
When a debt is issued, it is issued for that amount of money and it cannot really be modified, unless stated, aside from interest accumulating. As such, if you have the ability to print your own money and take out a loan, and you take out a $10 loan in "funnymoney" but you lose those $10, you can print $10 and pay it back, but there are $20 of "funnymoney" in circulation. They just lose a lot of their value. The debt can't change itself to match the exchange rate and you can print yourself out of debt, it just really damages your economy if you have to do that.
Would you go so far as to say the united states being $20 trillion in debt is irrelevent?
"The american treasury can print a single $20 trillion dollar bill to take care of it?"
The reason I say its impossible for a nation to print its way out of deficit and debt is: I can't remember a single instance of it happening throughout history.
Its easy to create anecdotal examples of how a country might print its way out of debt.
But in the real world, things never happen that way.
This is not quite so
If this debt is denominated in the same currency that you happen to issue, you can easily "return" this debt by printing as much money as needed. In fact, outright printing money is one of the ways of deficit financing, though in normal (more or less) situations normal governments rarely stick to it (Zimbabwean dollar is a glaring example what such monetary policy is set to eventually end in). On the other hand, in extreme cases such as all-out wars, the policy of printing money for financing military as well as other expenses is universal across the world. From Roman Empire to Weimar Republic authorities had been doing that
How does a nation print debt away without incurring hyperinflation, and when has this happened in history?
