Do you mean "people who loaned that money"? That is a lot of foreign governments who will refuse to keep loaning us more money which would mean we'd need to balance our budget pretty quickly, or face inflation.
Also, please realize that it is also lots of pensioners and also anyone expecting social security in the future [1].
What you're talking about isn't even Keynesian economics, it sounds like a form of monetary nihilism. We've been down that road before, and hyper-inflation is a real thing proven by history before [2].
[1] https://www.cbpp.org/research/social-security/policy-basics-....
Yes. Thank you for the correction.
Countries have whole net of iou-s between them and debts are not always expected to be paid back in full.
Some money borrowed comes from private market that you can disregard completely if you decide it was a bad idea and don't intend to repeat it in the future.
Yes. Hyperinflation is a thing but I wonder how high (stable) inflation you could have by just printing new money and using it to finance budget directly while preventing banks from inflating money supply with credit.
I'm not sure what the solution is, but I think assuming that because there's some monetary debt now it will all have to be paid back in the future is wrong because that's not what eventually is going to happen.
In fact, it’s worse: you’re not only losing trust on the bondholders whom you reneged to repay, but also most everyone else who observed it happening. You’ll be only left with people who will require handsome compensation for observably very real risk of not getting paid back.
So yes, our children will either have to repay all the debts we took, or default and lose immense amount of food will and trust that we are exploiting by borrowing at low rates. Either way, we are enriching ourselves at the expense of our children.
It does a pretty good job at explaining why the US can basically print money at will without facing inflation. Spoiler alert: people need to buy oil in dollars, but it cost us much of our domestic manufacturing base. I bring this up because the belief seems common at present that money is imaginary and that we've made so much of it without causing inflation is proof of this fact, but (as per the article) it's like a balloon as when you squeeze it, the air has got to go somewhere.
Money is just a way of keeping track of how much of future output of civilization given entity deserves. If we decide that people who borrowed the money now don't deserve it then, puff, there's no debt, nothing to pay back, no burden on future taxpayers.
On the other hand the resources that we dig up now, burn, pollute... those are real theft robbing the future.