t hungry because if anybody needs a meal in my neighborhood I will just buy them a meal. And if ten people need meals I will buy ten people meals. So I think the government and neighbors etc. even if they do not get their checks on time I think we will eat. I would predict at least for people who are willing to ask they are willing to talk to other people. I worry this might be some elderly who just do not want to ask for help. That would be the saddest. But for the most part there will not be starvation. There would be some special cases where just terrible tragedies happen but there will be special cases.

So the two big problems to get us back to work are demand and credit. I would say that credit is solvable if the government of the United States is willing to back the banks and back the people, is willing to change some rules, maybe force the credit companies to not report any defaults that happen during this period. So you could imagine that with the full weight of the government working on it, as long as the government of the United States exists with the biggest military in the world, we got credit right. So I think we have plenty of muscle to protect the banks and protect people who have credit problems. I think we can work that out.

The demand problem will not be completely fixed by giving people their money but it might help a little.

Let us talk about the interesting part. Yeah I will get to the interesting part. So this is the way it is supposed to work right. So the government is gonna print money. They are not going to borrow. This is a very important distinction. So the plan for these checks and for rescuing the economy is to actually just magically just say okay we have more money now. And the government just issues more money basically. It is not literally printed but you know what I mean. So government issues more money. They give it to the citizens. I will call it universal basic income for two months from whatever it ends up being. And they take that money and they stimulate the economy and they buy things from the stores and then the stores have profits. They can pay taxes and it goes back in. So that is pretty good.

Now but where does this two or three trillion dollars come from? That is the interesting question. Because how do you just say hey it is three trillion dollars. We just printed money and now we have three trillion dollars more. So is that free?

So I asked this question of actual economists. So I did a tweet and said you know economists explain this to me. Is there any downside? And if there is no downside — so I am seeing people asking in the comments. So it is not going to be borrowing this time. We do borrow and the national debt has grown. That is a separate problem. This is not that. This is actually just printing more money just because we can. We control the printing presses. The government issues the currency so it just issues more. So three trillion issued more.

Now what is the first question you ask yourself? Wait we can do that? If we can do that why have not we done that before? And you can see in the comments the reasoning. The reason is inflation. So the reason that you do not just print money is because then there would be more money than there is stuff. So where you used to have a hundred dollars floating around in the universe — this is oversimplified — say where you used to have a thousand dollars and let us say there was only one product in the world. Well the thousand dollars would buy you that product. But if you suddenly have two thousand dollars the person who said they would sell you the phone is going to think you know well they have two thousand so I will just try to charge them two thousand. See what happens. And of course they pay it because they are still paying everything they have for the phone.

So I am doing a bad job of explaining it but the point is if you just increase the money but not the number of products and services then you get inflation.

There is one exception though. There is only one exception where you could just print three trillion dollars and it would just be free. Do you know what that one exception is? This is the one exception. Because the demand is so low who could raise prices today? Now if you do not — let us not count the emergency equipment and the price gouging. That is the very small part of the economy. So not counting the price gouging who is gonna raise the price of their phone? Nobody. I mean they might want to. Well how do they do that? How is when you go back to work with your little UBI check you know and you go back to work and demand is low and nobody is getting paid as much. Does the person who makes this battery pack, did they raise the price? And you know while all the demand is no. No they cannot.

The only time, the only time that you could potentially just print three trillion dollars is right now. There is no other time you could do it and it would be free. Now it is correct that if the economy just came raging back and it was a major success you would have too much money and too soon because demand would come raging back. But I do not believe anybody thinks that that is going to happen in the next two years. So if you could take the risk of inflation and push it off a few years until the economy comes up you probably would not even notice it by then.

So here is the greater point which was explained to me by Joshua Gans who is a working professional economist. I go to him on Twitter for my economics questions. We do not always agree but his take on things always are rational. It makes sense and are well informed. And here is how he explained it but I like this explanation. It is just an alternate way of looking at the same thing. That putting money into the system, just printing three trillion dollars would be bad if it caused an imbalance. But if what it is doing is bringing balance back to the system it could be there is no way to know free money. We are in the only situation that I did not even imagine that we could ever be here frankly. Yeah okay there is no other situation that would leave all of our means of production perfectly in place except for a virus. That is it. Just a virus.

Even if it was an EMP even if it was that it would destroy all the electronics. You could not just go back to work. But the one and only situation where all of your assets and everything are still in place you just do not have any demand is this very exact specific situation.

You want to hear the best part? So not only do we get to invent three trillion dollars which by the way it is not like it solves our problem. We have a tough year ahead. I do not want to sugarcoat it. I am just telling you that the good news to help you balance against the stuff that genuinely is stuff you need to worry about. The good news is that it does look like we can print three trillion dollars just because we wanted to and it is only because of this situation.

Now what have I been telling you about Trump that makes him different from all other politicians? What is the saying I say all the time about him that he does the one thing that nobody else does and what is that? Somebody is gonna say it in the comments but he finds free money. Yeah there is money on the ground. He walks by the table and he says pile of money. Seriously nobody. Nobody. You all see this right? Am I the only one who sees this giant pile of money? I guess I am. Going once. Going twice. Anybody?

All right he takes the big pile of money and he does it time after time. Now usually it is in the political sense you know. You see he says or does the thing that was easy. I said this when he formed a Space Force. You know some president was going to form Space Force. It was going to be him or the one after or the one after that whatever. So it was free money because whoever is the first one to do it is forever the one who formed Space Force. So it was just an example of free money. Of course it was just smart to do that. So we have it.

And let me say as clearly as I can economics is complicated. I have a degree in this stuff and I had to ask an actual economist to check my thinking. Now he added a lot of texture that really helped my thinking but the basic thing is that there can be a perfect situation in which you can just print three trillion dollars and it might be this. Now you could not do it again because once the economy is solid you lose that opportunity. Then it is just inflationary.

So here is the good part. You know people are talking about the infrastructure bill and you know did you really want to borrow another trillion dollars to do infrastructure? Guess what it might be free. Infrastructure might be free if you do it now because that would be part of the three trillion that is free money because nobody can raise their prices while demand is so low. So we might have gotten infrastructure for free.

Now part of that infrastructure I would think and I am sure we are thinking this way but there will be more emphasis on this. We saw the importance of working at home and we saw how important online schooling was. And importantly we saw that there are a lot of people who did not have access to digital products. So what good is online school if you do not have a computer and you do not have Wi-Fi? So certainly a big part of the infrastructure is going to be to get everybody the capability of online education.

And then free college. Because if you can make your online education industry work which it does not really work well now but it would be easy to do that. If you can make it work then the president can say you know I do not know if we could afford to send everybody to college for free but we can give you a government kick-ass certified college degree that you can work at on your leisure from home and it will be better than college because it will be made by the best teachers and producers and editors and writers instead of just filming a guy who knows how to teach a class.

So we might get infrastructure for free and might build out the last of the digital miles. That might make college free. It might make regular school maybe a modified some, a little of both. And I also think that healthcare is going to change forever because of this and maybe in a positive way.

You know I have told you before that if you have an entrepreneur in the room the best thing you can do with your environment is shake it. Just shake the box. And then the entrepreneur looks in the box and goes oh I do not see. Shake it again. Shake shake shake. Oh look at this. These things just lined up. I can make a business out of that.

And I talked about Trump does this all the time with politics. If he does not like the argument the way it is he will just introduce something that just shakes it all up. And in the midst of chaos he is always the one-eyed king. You know he is the one who attracts all the attention, gets all the quotes. So if he can create some chaos and shake the box he is the king. It works over and over again.

Likewise with healthcare. I think healthcare got a major shake-up. It did not want one and not for any productive purpose. It was just like this major thing that happened and it got shaken. And there are a lot of entrepreneurs in that space. You know the people who are spinning up these new tests. I mean that is serious solid gold turbocharged entrepreneurship. There are literally hundreds of companies that just sprung out of now