I don't claim to be an economist, but direct stimulus payments to Americans totaled about $2100 on average. The US economy is worth trillions annually. I'm sure the stimulus checks made a small bump on inflation in the short term, but they couldn't possibly drive sustained, systemic inflation. Unless you're talking about the broader fiscal packages for supporting businesses/unemployment benefits during COVID when you say "printing new money?"
Printing new money means spending money that doesn't (yet) exist.
If there is 1 trillion dollars in the possession of all humans and the government buyys a trillion dollars worth of good with new money, all previous money os jow worth half it's previous value.
> I could explain to a child how printing new money causes inflation, which we did twice since COVID.
We've printed money a dozen times in the 30 years prior to 2022. Economists predicted that all of them would cause inflation. None of them did.
In 2022 we had money printing and a supply side squeeze. Insisting that the inflation was caused by the money printing rather than the supply side squeeze takes incredible chutzpah.
The money printing in response to COVID followed by the the infrastructure bill were at a scale not seen before and shouldn't be so easily dismissed in reference to previous deficit spending.
Germany (and others) printed at a lower rate. If it was a momentary phenomenon, they would have appreciated against the dollar and seen less inflation. Instead they depreciated against the dollar and saw more inflation.
