I don’t think the argument is “COVID relief bills vs no COVID relief bills.” I think the argument is between “bad COVID relief bills and good COVID relief bill

I don’t think the argument is “COVID relief bills vs no COVID relief bills.” I think the argument is between “bad COVID relief bills and good COVID relief bills.” Of course we’ll never know the contrafactuals, but I think it was possible to have more precise interventions that would have helped with COVID without boosting inflation. The example I saw first hand is that many of my college friends got $600 stimulus checks then $600 more then $1400 even though they just switched to virtual classes and weren’t affected. I think the intent was to just get cash out quickly to people who needed the money and didn’t have any means tests. But as a result many people got cash who didn’t need it, and likely people who needed more didn’t get it. As a result of these thousands of dollars to the maybe two dozen college kids I knew, they just bought more stuff. Comically, magic the gathering card prices shot up because people just bought “luxury” items with the extra cash. My observation is likely not generalizable but seems like it happened a lot. So my thought is that it’s ok to criticize policy that lead to the inflation we’re experiencing now. Critical examination of causes should help us get out of this current problem and, hopefully, help us prevent future ones. But pretending there was a false dichotomy of “do nothing” and “do shitty” will just have us neglect reality and stay vulnerable.