I haven't been particularly worried about hyperinflation; despite not know as much as Megan McArdle I was thinking along similar lines as she is when she says "Seriously, Stop Worrying About Hyperinflation".
If you're talking about a past stock of debt, it makes some sense to talk about it solely in terms of dollars--really, accounting entries. But of course, the reason the government borrowed the money is that it needed to secure real goods in the economy, and its citizens didn't want to reduce their consumption enough to pay for it all with their taxes. Sometimes that's a one time event, like a war, in which case inflating away your debt looks quite attractive (immoral, possibly--but then, lots of attractive things are immoral, n'est ce pas?)But more often it's an ongoing problem. In which case, it's hard to aggressively inflate, because within a very short period of time, your ability to borrow in your own currency at attractive rates will fall off. So if you're going to hyperinflate, you need to be prepared to quickly close the gaps between the real goods and services you want to consume, and the real goods and services you want your citizens to give up in order to pay their taxes. In other words, you need to be prepared to stop running a budget deficit--or to resort to increasingly desperate tactics like Argentina's nationalization of its private pension regime in order to loot the accounts.
In the US, the problem is even more complicated because so many of its mandatory payouts are inflation-indexed; it doesn't do you any good to inflate your debt away if half the debt is owed to inflation-linked Social Security accounts.
She concludes by arguing that there are plenty of politicians who expect to be in office for decades more distributing pork to their benefactors, and hyperinflation would derail the gravy train. Sounds reasonable!
Corollary: is this a good argument in favor of entrenched political interests and pork spending?
