That could work, but then again, it might not be so simple.

Until 1971, the U.S. dollar was backed by gold and silver. That means that you could bring your dollar to a bank and redeem it for one dollar worth of gold or silver. Today, the dollar is backed by the strength of the U.S. economy and the size of its GDP. But for explaining purposes, let’s say it’s backed by marbles.

Let’s imagine you have five dollars and those are worth five marbles. To buy a marble, you need one dollar. If you print another five dollars without somehow producing another five marbles, your extra dollars aren’t really backed by anything. Basically, now your ten dollars are only worth five marbles and to buy one marble, you need two dollars. This is called inflation.

Now let’s say you owe your friend five dollars for the five marbles that she gave you last week. Unfortunately, you don’t have five dollars to pay her. If you print five dollars, then you can pay her what you owe but she will end up with dollars that are worth less. However, as long as we are producing more marbles, we can print more money because it has something to back it. In the U.S. we pretty much trust the Government to make sure we have the marbles to back our dollars. So when they print more money, we trust that the GDP will grow to match it.

Printing money may help us pay old debt but in the end, without a strong and growing economy, it does more harm than good by making all of our dollars weaker and forcing prices up.

What do we learn from all this? Printing more money doesn’t help us in the long run unless whatever is backing our money is growing too.