Can you pay off the debt by printing more money?

I want to introduce this by thinking about Fed-owned national debt.  The current amount of U.S. Treasury securities owned by the Federal Reserve, as of 4/10/19, is $2.153 trillion.  This is a real asset but purchased with funny money.  The money to buy this was created out of thin air. The Fed now has an asset (Treasury bonds) which pays interest, and in turn they have a liability (bank reserves) upon which they pay interest.  The interest received from the Treasury is hopefully more than the interest paid out, and the profit is used to pay Fed expenses and the excess is paid back to the Treasury.  So really, this amount should be subtracted from the National Debt.  It has in effect been retired.  For my calculations on the debt ratio, this should be subtracted.

The total debt held by the public is now about  $16.2 trillion.  Subtract out the Fed owned amount and there is really about $14 trillion outstanding.  Hypothetically, could the Fed stop paying interest on excess reserves and just buy up the entire balance?  So now  the Fed would own the entire debt.  And then any interest received, just remit it back to the Treasury. So the conclusion is, that no, you could not pay off the debt this way. But you could stop paying interest on it.

What if you swapped the debt for non-interest bearing perpetual bonds?  A perpetual bond never has to be paid back, and in some ways it is more like a stock than a bond, although it has no voting rights. It still has value, the same as a dollar bill has value.  How about making these perpetual bonds bearer instruments , with $100,000 and $1 million bills?  At this point, the national debt isn't a problem at all, because you don't have to pay interest on it, and you never have to pay it back.  So it has in effect been paid off. With cash.  You can just forget about it, except for maybe replacing worn bills.  

So that is my magic trick for the day.  Yes, you could pay off the national debt by printing cash.  And it wouldn't be a default, except for not paying interest in the future.  If there is a choice between defaulting on principal and defaulting on future interest payments, it would be better to default on the future interest payments.

So we just solved the debt problem.  Only now, every bank in the country would go out of business and all the bankers and financiers would be unemployed.  But maybe that wouldn't be such a bad thing.