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there's no guarantee that infusions of currency will reach the people that will actually spend them Why not just print money and mail it to every American? If

• nostrademons 18y ago
  Yummyfajitas has a good answer to this elsewhere on-thread. Basically, money collects at whichever firm needs it least. If you give it to low-income people and they spend it, then it's now in the hands of someone who probably just received a lot of money. If they don't need to spend it and expect its value to go up, they'll hoard it. You need consistent inflationary expectations across the economy to keep money flowing. Keynes actually suggested that this is why it took a couple thousand years after the invention of money for a modern industrial society to take hold. A manor lord has every incentive to hoard the rents his peasants give him, so instead of pumping them back into the economy by funding the promising waterwheel a bright upstart proposed, he sits on his treasure hoard.