808RedDevils t1_j2e5zfq wrote
Reply to comment by Ansuz07 in ELI5: If money today is all digital, why can't all the countries governments just go on the computer and add like five more zero's to their account and fix everything? Same principal is 100 years ago too I guess, why not just print more cash? by ss89898
Yeah, those stimulus payments that the government sent out were poorly done. I realize some people needed them and those are the people which should have received them but me and my wife received thousands of dollars automatically even though we were both still working through the entire pandemic. They really needed more of a surgical approach instead of blanket payments.
Ansuz07 t1_j2e6kvh wrote
That's somewhat easy to say in hindsight when we don't have the ill effects of a more surgical program to compare. Its the key problem in economics - true experiments with control groups are incredibly rare, so we can rarely say which option was "best" with certainty.
A surgical program would have likely stemmed the inflation issue, but would also have likely taken much longer to execute, leaving people who needed funds without them for potentially months. It also would have "false negatives" - denying money entirely due to bureaucratic errors.
Whether or not that would have been worse than the partial impact it had on inflation is impossible to say.
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