"I think the much bigger worry is that we are going to drive ourselves into a corner where the bond markets will force us to slash benefits to people who have planned their lives around them, making those people worse off than they would have been if the program had never existed. And also, of course, that they will raise taxes by enough to produce serious, painful deadweight loss. But until Ben Bernanke starts looking much more inflation-friendly than I’ve so far seen, any kind of effort to totally inflate away our national debt is pretty low on my list of potential problems."