Can someone help me out here?

[opebo]

I have heard that we have record deficits and that prices are falling everywhere. What would happen if we tried to print more money to pay off the deficits and to stabilize spending power? Will that work? Will we just scare people? Will we just encourage them to be lazy?

It would work perfectly, weasel.  There would be no reason for creditors to fear a proper 'quantitative easing' which would set us back on reasonable 'inflation' of say 1-5%, instead of the current severe deflation.  They only need worry if we would get considerably higher than that, which is I'm afraid a pipe dream in our current slack economy.

It wouldn't make anyone 'lazy' - the rich are already lazy of course, as is their function, and printing money to get the economy back into growth would have no effect on the hard working poor - they have no choice but to work hard or starve.  All a 'good economy' means to them is they are allowed to work (in other words used up).

By the way, some pretty sickening right-wing garbage in the couple of posts above, eh?

[opebo]

It's been tried over and over again historically - the result is always the same: you print money you get inflation, you don't print money you don't get inflation.

No, that's not the case, as Japan shows.

You have to remember that you're speaking from a historical understanding that is within the Keynesian period, which presupposes reasonable capacity usage in an economy.  Neoliberalism has eliminated a lot of what used to be thought of as normal in an economy, and in the new deflation and dearth-of-demand economy (or rather the return to the 19th century) that we live in today, printing money is only going to slightly counteract deflation.  To create inflation in the current system is very, very difficult.

[opebo]

The whole thing ($52 trillion)

The 'whole thing' is only $52 trillion?  That's only like four times GDP.

[opebo]

If you print money you get inflation: there is full agreement on this point between neoliberals, keynesians or whatever: you won't find an economist who disagrees.

Well, I disagree.  It is far from as simple as you suggest.  If we have, for example, the capacity in auto factories to build 10 million cars per year, but the 'private consumers' are buying only 5 million, it will not cause any inflation if the State prints enough money to buy another 2.5 million cars and throw them in the ocean.  Its all about capacity usage, which even in the best of times over the last 3 decades has been poor.

But surely as a right-winger you worship at the alter of supply-and-demand, and most particularly supply.  Doesn't the assumption that printing money always leads to inflation focus entirely on supply (of dollars) and not at all on demand (stuff to be traded for dollars)?