So, I simplify things.

"Seigniorage" is the service charge a government expects to be paid for printing or coining money.

We don't have to use the word for everything. It is not the same as inflation. It is not the same as a tax. It is not the same as paying off debt. It is not the same as anything else, really.

I have a big fat dictionary from 1979, Webster's New Twentieth Century Dictionary, Unabridged. It has this:

I have an older one that I grew up with, same name (plus "of the English Language"), from 1950. It has this:

Wikipedia has this:

Seigniorage is the service charge a government expects to be paid for printing or coining money.

Noah writes:

Ron Paul wants to have the Fed destroy its holdings of U.S. Treasury bonds. This would be retroactive seigniorage; it would mean that the money that the Fed printed in the past to buy those Treasury bonds was actually printed to pay off the U.S.'s sovereign debt.

Printing money to pay off debt is not seigniorage.

Shredding financial assets is not seigniorage.

In the days of Charlemagne I suppose, and Alfred the Great, and Robin Hood, and during the California gold rush the mint would take a percentage of the gold or silver you brought in to be minted. That was seigniorage.

Today, the Federal Reserve spends maybe five percent of its income on operations. The rest of the Fed's income gets turned over to the Treasury.

That five percent is seigniorage.

In the U.S. economy today, that and nothing else is seigniorage. To say otherwise clouds issues that require all the clarity we can muster.