@snood,
When Lloyd George took a delegation to Paris for the 1919 Peace Conference, one of the junior members was John Maynard Keynes. Keynes was very ,uch impressed with his own excellence, and came to resent Lloyd George for not giving him a bigger role. Keynes eventually channeled that into one of the most important works on economics, and the most important work on government finance. In 1936, he published
The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, One result of that was that governments (conveniently for them) took Keynes to say that when necessary, you can just print more money. Keynes' argument and advice was, of course, more complex and nuanced than that, and he certainly pointed out that it was necessary to put controls in place to "repay" the debt incurred by just printing money in time of economic slump. People in government ignored that part, they didn't like it. It did not work for Franklin Roosevelt, but he was bailed out by Second World War, which greatly expanded employment, quite apart from the more than 9,000,000 Americans in uniform.
Since that time, there has been a delicate balanced maintained between just printing more money, and acting responsibly to reduce government debt.
But there is a powerful exception in this case which ought not to be ignored. The American dollar is the currency of refuge in times of economic doubt or slump. This is already in process with currency traders buying U.S. dollars as a hedge against unstable inflationary pressures and the weakness of other currencies. This administration (or whatever administration replaces it after the next general election) can get away with just printing money for quite some time, while the American dollar remains the refuge, or safe haven currency.
