Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) said the following on NBC’s “Meet the Press”: “I’m talking about a jobs program of a trillion dollars or more. We’ve got to put Americans to work. That’s the only way to revitalize this economy. When people work they earn money, they spend that money, and that’s what gets the economy up and going.” Actually, there are numerous ways to revitalize the economy, but Waters and the Obama Administration are opposed to any and all solutions that are not initiated by government. It doesn’t take a Harvard-trained economist to know what to do. In fact, we would be better off if we didn’t put our faith in the “best and the brightest” academic elitists who never owned or ran a business.

This is the same Maxine Waters who told members of the Tea Party philosophy to “go straight to hell.” Where does Maxine expect to find a trillion dollars? A trillion is a thousand billion. A billion is a thousand million. It’s a lot of money. She may be calling for higher taxes. Higher taxes only redistribute wealth. Wealth is not created. While some problems may temporarily be fixed in one place, more problems will be created in other places. Of course, if you tax productivity, then productive people will lose incentive to be productive. What is seemingly gained in one year, is lost in subsequent years.

If fixing an economy were as simple as printing money, then why don’t Greece and other bankrupt countries oil up the printing presses and spread the ink and let the paper flow? Of course, they’ve already inflated the currency, and it’s not working. Also, there are moral and practical problems associated with inflation. It wasn’t too long ago that Weimar Germany hoped to solve its economic problems through inflation. German banknotes had lost so much value that they were used for wallpaper. The currency was so devalued that it was “turned over to junk dealers by the ton.”

Printing-press money had political consequences. “Hyperinflation is widely believed to have contributed to the Nazi takeover of Germany and Adolf Hitler’s rise to power. Adolf Hitler himself in his book, Mein Kampf, makes many references to the German debt and the negative consequences that brought about the inevitability of ‘National Socialism.’”

Take a look at the Zimbabwean dollar, the official currency of Zimbabwe from 1980 to 12 April 2009. It was considered to be among the highest valued currency units when it was introduced in 1980. It didn’t take long for Maxine-Waters-like policies ruined its value. In 2009, it took 1,000,000,000,000 (one trillion) Zimbabwe dollars to equal one new dollar.

There is the moral side of inflation that almost no one talks about. Let’s say that you like to drink wine with your meal at your favorite steak restaurant. The waiter brings you a medium-rare filet, pours a glass of red wine, and walks away. Your mouth waters as your fork and knife meet to cut off a juicy piece. As you slowly chew on the tasty morsel, and the juices bathe your palette, you take a sip of wine. It’s near food ecstasy, until you realize that the wine tastes like mouth wash. You call for the waiter. He explains that to cut costs, the restaurant owner decided to add water to the wine. In fact, water was also injected into the cuts of meat to give them more weight.

If a restaurant chain ever did this, Maxine Waters and her fellow Democrats (and some Republicans, too) would sic the Feds on them. It would make the front page of every newspaper in the country, and rightfully so. But it’s OK for these same outraged politicians to dilute the value of every dollar we now possess or will possess by inflating the currency. “Stimulus” is another word for adding water to wine. But since the government does it, it’s OK. This is an old crime that the prophet Isaiah wrote about: “Your silver has become dross, your drink diluted with water” (Isa. 1:22).