Compelling Mexico to Pay for the Wall: https://www.donaldjtrump.com/positions/pay-for-the-wall

This is not strictly true, and it's important to this debate to understand why. The relevant equation is the equation of exchange: MV = PQ, where M is the supply of money, V is the velocity of money (how fast money gets spent), P is the price of goods, and Q is expenditures on goods and services (demand).

You're suggesting that if you raise M, P goes up. But there's two other possibilities, instead: Q goes up, or V goes down.

We actually did this experiment just recently, where we printed a whole bunch of money and dumped it into the economy (quantitative easing). We did NOT get inflation (increase in P), because V went way down over the same period - basically, the banks absorbed all of the money and didn't invest it, so it didn't actually move into the economy.

But if we gave money to poor people by printing currency, it's likely that V would go up, because these people would actually spend all of that money, and the people they spent it with would spend it, etc.

It's possible that in this situation, we WOULD get price inflation. But even in this case, that's not clear - what might happen instead is that Q goes up - we would simply get a general increase in demand for goods and services, but prices would remain more or less stable.

The difference is whether you think that we are limited in productive capacity. Many (some?) economists think that the main problem with our economy is a severe lack of demand - people are just too poor to buy shit. If people wanted to buy more stuff, we'd have no problem making it - we have factories and factory factories. In this situation, if we give everyone a large fistful of cash, all that happens is we all suddenly get to be busy doing exactly what we want - making shit and enjoying the products - without a huge increase in price.

Price increases happen when people are demanding goods and services but we can't produce enough to meet that demand. It's possible this might happen if we print a bunch of money, but I think in our economy, where the main story is severe underemployment, where productive capacity is going to waste, where smart people who get PhDs don't know what to do with themselves, this is not what would happen; we're much more likely to see a long period of economic growth before we start to see inflation happening.