Right now there is a controversy in Washington D.C. as to whether or not we should raise the debt ceiling. I really don't see any problem with raising the existing debt ceiling, since it only stands at a modest $17 trillion, and that should be easy to pay off.
Here is my plan. Let us assume that the federal government has 1,000 printers printing money, although I doubt they really have that many in service. Let's assume that those 1,000 printers are set to work printing our largest denomination of currency that is now in production — the $100 bill — and each printer can print one $100 bill per second. Let's assume that those printers are running around the clock 24/7 and never break down or have to be serviced. At that rate, we could print almost $8.7 billion per day.
So then, it would only take about five years and four months to print the entire $17 trillion to pay off the current debt. But we are currently racking up about another three-quarters of a trillion a year in additional debt, so the printing presses would have to keep running.
Leslie Kuff, Timonium