Is printing money to pay government expenses regressive or progressive taxation? Lets say that the government decides to pay some of its expenses by printing money*. This (according to some schools of thought) effectively increases the inflation rate and devalues the value of the country's currency. So the government skims off a little bit from the whole country's money &amp; the money everyone had is worth a bit less.

So we have a weird indirect form of taxation. 

Would this form of taxation be:


Regressive  (taxing the 'poor' disproportionately) 
Progressive (taxing the 'rich' disproportionately) 


*Not actually printing, but you get what I mean.
*Lets assume the amount created is below the amount which would trigger hyper-inflation.
It rather depends on what happens to wages and interest rates, a ceteris paribus issue, and who you identify as "rich" or "poor": for example current workers borrowing to buy a house tend to be richer than the unemployed but poorer than those with large savings.


If wages fail to rise then existing workers may lose from this with their pay falling in real terms (while new workers resulting from the increased expenditure could gain)
If interest rates fail to rise then existing holders of money may lose with the value their assets falling in real terms (while existing borrowers may gain as they have to repay less in real terms)


If both rise to reflect the impact of inflation, it is much harder to identify who is bearing the cost

Incidentally, the extent to which moderate unfunded increases in government expenditure actually affects inflation is an empirical question and the evidence is not conclusive