[alaxhn]

Like you say inflation erodes public debt and so the consequences of taking on a lot of public debt is that the government is also tempted to increase inflation.

If you print money you will increase the rate of inflation. The question is how much and when. During crisis, often lending is impacted which can lead to a decrease in the supply of available capital. Printing money in this circumstance can head off deflation and thus like you point out you have printed money without causing inflation to increase above the historical baseline rate like we did in the 2008 crisis. Crucially, you cannot rely on this strategy to reliably make up for a budget shortfall as we have seen time and time again (see bullets for two examples). The parent comment is correct that often a perpetual budget shortfall leading to an expansion of public debt can and often does lead to an inflation crisis but you are right that there is a bit more nuance.

To make an analogy: if you eat much more than the average person you will become overweight. You might object that this is factually incorrect and a silly thing to say because there are some exceptions such as if you only eat fresh vegetables, are training for a marathon, have a medical condition etc but in broad strokes this is true. However in the general case, eating too much leads to weight gain (even if it is arguably not the root cause which may be that we have engineered our food supply for financial incentives rather than compatibility with our evolutionary history :D).

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debasement#Roman_Empire * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_money_of_the_Qing_dynast...