[stingraycharles]

Yeah in the grand scheme of things, this doesn’t impact inflation all that much, but it does help the people that need it most. Just like increasing the minimum wage to keep up with inflation does.

Over the past year businesses have increased their prices all over the board, you can’t then just simply say “but inflation!!” when you want to help the people with some amount of compensation for this.

[vladimirralev]

If you take it just one step further, the people "that need it most" really only need it in order to instantly donate it to the megacorps with pricing power at ever-increasing prices. The handouts help only in that instant and at the very next clock cycle that money is now in the hands of the megacorps. Printing money and handouts only help the top of the top in the pricing power hierarchy. If you want to actually help people you'd be doing taxes on excess. Everything else ends up in gigantic accumulation of wealth at the top in just a few steps down the game.

[stingraycharles]

From that perspective, anything always ends up in the top of the top of megacorps, and I find it not a very compelling argument to not help people just because they’re at the mercy of megacorps.

You want to tax these megacorps additionally yes, especially if they’re profiting from the current situation. But at the same time, it’s also important to redestribute that wealth towards those who have the biggest problems right now.

[vladimirralev]

With handouts, you only redistribute the wealth for an instant and you need to keep printing to sustain it. On top of that, the stability of this system becomes dependent on active approach of handing out money (i.e. tight dependency on central government).

And I am not saying not to help the poor people. I am saying printing money doesn't help poor people, it helps the rich. If you want to help poor people like I said you can tax the excess, or you can provide a specific minimal food/energy/shelter. But again, handing out money for free only helps the top of top.

As a side note, you know a lot of the poorest people in EM and frontier markets save money in USD either to escape their own inflating currency or as a dollar peg in their country. These people are poor and suffer the inflation in global markets, but they do not benefit from the US handouts. They can never outbid a money printer. And that's in fact the likely cause of the riots across the world in countries that don't have swap lines with the Fed.

[babarock]

Megacorps will get away with keeping their prices this high, as long as the gov keeps funding these "relief" payments.

It's using taxpayer money to artificially maintain prices high.

[stingraycharles]

But we used taxpayer money to first inject trillions into the top of the economy. And then when the inevitable happens, we can’t just throw our arms in the air “because inflation!” — that’s a great way to make sure that the bottom of the economy will suffer tremendously due to all this.

Because their income hasn’t increased nearly as much as the amount of inflation that occurred.