Jared Bernstein Struggles to Explain Why We Don’t Just Print All of the Money the Government Uses

BERNSTEIN: “The U.S. government can’t go bankrupt because we can print our own money.”

UNKNOWN: “It obviously begs the question, why exactly are we borrowing in a currency that we print ourselves? I’m waiting for someone to stand up and say, ‘Why do we borrow our own currency in the first place?’

Reporter: “Like you said, they print the dollar. So why does the government even borrow?”
BERNSTEIN: “Well, um, the, uh — so the, I mean, again — some of this stuff gets — some of the language that the MM — some of the language and concepts are just confusing. I mean, the government definitely prints money and it definitely lends that money. Which is why — the government definitely prints money and then it lends that money by — by selling bonds. Is that what they do? They — they — yeah, they — they — they sell bonds. Yeah, they sell bonds, right? Since they sell bonds and people buy the bonds and lend them the money. Yeah, so a lot of times — a lot of times, at least to my ear, with MMT, the language and the concepts can be kind of unnecessarily confusing, but there is no question that the government prints money and then it uses that money to um — so, um, yeah, I guess I’m just — I can’t really talk. I don’t get it. I don’t know what they’re talking about, like, ‘cause it’s like, the government clearly prints money, it does it all the time, and it clearly borrows. Otherwise we wouldn’t be having this debt and deficit conversation. So I don’t think there’s anything confusing there.”