Unfortunately that’s not how it works. Evidence: current situation.
Maybe you should actually find a citation rather than give a “some people say…” answer.
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you’d think they would go up though since a dollar is worth less and less
I’m not at all clear what you think proves your point. This psychology/profligate spending on consumer goods is just the same “millennials need to buy less Starbucks” which is rightly ridiculed.
Yes, that’s why inflation sucks for policy makers. When things become expensive it makes the problem worse to give people more money to pay for the things. But that’s the case whether it’s done with SOCIALISM from the government or just higher wages the Great And Glorious Market.
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A decade of QE had seemingly no effect but giving everyone like 3 grand in 14 months broke the consumer economy?
Bruh.
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No, the cost of consumer goods was driven up when stimulus money was going around. Especially electronics. That’s not how it was intended to work, which makes it a policy failure.
We could have given the same amount of money, but targeted it, and it would have done more good for those receiving it and caused less inflation.
Obviously the supply chain stuff is (mostly) unrelated.
That’s not what I said, you’re twisting my take to an extreme. I’m simply saying if the goal is to help people with food, housing, and gas, the help should be targeted. I concede this approach fails certain moral tests, but on the other hand it works better and helps people more.
You do realize that “overborrowing,” which was the focus of the first article, is not the same thing as blowing gift money foolishly? And the research studies discussed related to volunteers being given different amounts of currency in a lab setting–not really relevant to how families living in poverty make life and death financial decisions with their limited resources.
This doesn’t even get into the ways in which uneducated poor people are specifically targeted by unscrupulous lenders.
I don’t mean to be contentious so I’ll just say disagree immensely with that as a solution.
I don’t see how means testing basic life necessities makes them any cheaper. You just move the payor from John Q. Public to the State of Pennsylvania.
I said tomorrow
dollar has actually held okay vs other currencies lately tho but yeah if people think the dollar is going to shit first then people will plow into stonks cause it’s gotta go somewhere
a decade of QE gave us the longest bull market ever and all of us lived above our means where we would’ve otherwise
I didn’t agree with it cause it’s just kicking a can down the road with worse consequences eventually but that’s politics
So we’re in agreement then.
Edit: you ninja edited. I still retain my position that if supply chains had rolled on unabated then3k stimmy money woulda been easily hoovered up with barely any ripples.
It’s such a trivial amount of money, especially over that period of time. Like the economy couldnt deal with people having an extra $250 a month.
Those studies reference psychological effects that apply to the situation being discussed. There are numerous other problems, such as predatory lenders as you pointed out.
I didn’t say means testing. I’m just saying if you want to give $1,000 a month to people to help with living expenses, it will work better if you force it to be spent on necessities. Could be grocery gift cards for for anything in a grocery store, gas gift cards, etc. There are various ways to do it.
The reality is that giving cash had some unintended negative consequences that will be amplified by the right and used to prevent giving any kind of assistance in the future.
Not if the average person is losing these dollars quicker because they are worth less and less.
Actually what I think would be ideal would be to establish something similar to an HSA account, that could be used for food, housing, gas, utilities, etc and otherwise served as a retirement account that one could invest into their choice of a few index funds.
Then the government could deposit directly into it and people could use it for those expenses or save it for retirement. It would create a path of least resistance towards saving and investing, while also providing for immediate necessities.
You could potentially be creative in other ways to incentivize saving and investing, but that seems like a good start to me.
It was apparent at the time that the stimulus money was on the high end of what was being distributed. But it doesn’t mean that it was bad policy. When you lockdown an economy and prevent folks from working their job you’d better be damn sure that you’re paying that person enough to stay out of hardship. The overwhelming amount of folks who lived paycheck to paycheck didn’t give a rats ass about catching covid, they were paranoid about their financial wellbeing and if their fears came true by a miscalculated underpayment of employement benefits, things would have been bad for other reasons.
Again, I’m not saying we should have given less help. I’m saying it should have been mostly targeted to certain spending categories (necessities).