Inflation might be lower,

>but also there would be more homeless,

Would there? You don't know that with spending less money on basics, people would be freed up and less tight on charitable care for the homeless, or at least more individually involved, which brings accountability to orgs providing homeless services.

> more bankruptcy,

Bankruptcy is a good thing. When you finish bankruptcy proceedings you are absolved of debt and your life immediately gets less stressful. The risk should 100% be on the lender, they are the ones who tried to get free money. Perhaps we should not have so many bad loans and a correction is due.

> more unemployed.

Maybe this wouldn't be such a bad thing. It's not hard to argue that as a society we are overworked. Would it be so bad if more people could have natural access to 4-day workweeks, if fathers or mothers could afford to stay at home and care for the kids while their spouse or whatever, polycule coop, goes off to bring home the bacon?

Your assertion encodes some assumptions, which ultimately, are responsible for the degraded relative quality of life in the lower classes of western nations (to include "socialist" countries which also have seen rising wage gaps in spite of their social programmes -- but they all have in common adherence to contemporary macro theory)

Your arguments seem comically out-of-touch and perhaps even offered in bad faith.

Some people are overworked, but that doesn't mean that mass unemployment will help: it just means that some people will remain overworked and others will sink into poverty.

You are conflating, I assume intentionally, the legal proceeding bankruptcy, with the colloquial term bankruptcy meaning simply having zero liquidity. For most working people, the latter is definitely not a good state to be in.

Your first assertion is the least coherent. Are you seriously saying that when people have less money, they're inclined to spend more on charity? Give me a break.

> You are conflating, I assume intentionally, the legal proceeding bankruptcy

Wrong. The macroeconomic "fear" of disinflation is that people will not be able to make interest payments and default on their debt. This will cascade because those debt issuers also have debts of their own, and there will be an unwinding. Sometimes a good old jubilee is what you want.

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.

You may be right. But I didn't see any compelling counterproposals to the bills that were eventually passed. In fact, even with the benefit of hindsight, I still don't see any serious arguments about what those bills should have been, with the intent to improve the current situation.