Is there some reason why a country experiencing deflation can't print money and hand it out to voters until inflation returns?
That's a great question. Japan has been doing this for about a decade. Shinzo Abe kind of called it abenomics; aka quantative easing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abenomics
It has worked, no question, effectively exactly as you propose. The problem is that it clearly didn't solve the problem. While also creating new problems and since the original problem never gets solved, when you are forced to cut spending because the cost of debt has become too crippling. You retain all the new problems and now feel the old problems.
https://tradingeconomics.com/japan/government-spending-to-gd...
https://tradingeconomics.com/japan/government-debt-to-gdp
266% debt to gdp is about 24% higher than the peak drama about Greece's collapse.
https://tradingeconomics.com/japan/government-budget
Haven't balanced their budget since the 1990s.
Tough decisions coming for Japan.
It makes no difference whatsoever that JGBs are held domestically in practice because it is harder to push through a debt restructuring politically when voters are the ones losing money (you have seen this in Italy too, they have "bailed in" domestic savers which has significantly reduced their options...if the debt is owned by foreign investors, you can usually restructure and point at them: look at these greedy capitalists, terrible...but we have no choice).
On some of the other stuff mentioned above, the reason why Japan is in such a mess is because their financial/corporate sectors is totally screwed. There is no real demand for money, corporate balance sheets are loaded down with cash, no-one wants to invest, demand for money is so low that Japan's savings banks are huge players in US corporate lending, banks seem to have no actual capacity to make corporate loans...they don't know how, they just buy US bonds and call it a day, monetary policy (counter-intuitively) is making this worse, it is reducing the supply of "safe assets" but hasn't increased the capacity of institutions for "non-safe assets", it has led to a significant reduction in lending within Japan because rates overseas are so much higher...it is a real shit storm, but it all comes down to monetary policy officials not understanding money transmission (unusually for Japan, in the 1980s the govt was involved in directing lending on a loan-by-loan basis so they have a history of real control over monetary transmission).
Of which ~45% is held by the bank of japan itself.
https://tradingeconomics.com/japan/central-bank-balance-shee...
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-japan-economy-boj-idUSKCN...
Japan is so bankrupt that nobody else will hold their not properly rated debt.
Mind you, Japan's clearly bankrupt central bank cannot actually go bankrupt. There is no gold standard, there is no bank run, there is no liquidation requirements. So what? You just magically keep raising the imaginary numbers with no consequences?
This is where OP happens.
Flipside, I am curious about an alternative approach to fixing the issue like Greece did. Japan is headed toward a situation where their currency will be worthless and their people own nothing. Yes it will mean all retirees pretty much have to go get a job but the federal gov will effectively take ownership over most land. People who actually own their homes will effectively become fiefs.
I bet bitcoin and similar coins is beyond popular in Japan right now.
No matter how much money they print, it can't solve for an economy where there are fewer consumers and producers every year.
A low birth rate also is certainly not some immutable characteristic of Japanese culture; they had very high birth rates through most of the 20th century. It's clearly the result of economic circumstances and incentives, like the high cost of childcare and long working hours. These do seem like things that government and monetary policy cannot control directly but can certainly influence. In some respect the low birth rate might be both a cause of deflation itself and also a result.
Lastly,
> No matter how much money they print, it can't solve for an economy where there are fewer consumers and producers every year.
It might not solve the economy, but speaking strictly of inflation, it doesn't seem imaginable that no matter how much money they print it won't create inflation. They must just be printing the wrong kind of money. (As this economist explains, there are indeed different kinds: https://youtu.be/4xgHbW2A9KE )
If they were giving it bout evenly, there’d be no difference. Nominally, the price of goods would increase but so would your reserve. So there’be no added incentive to buy.
Japan is dealing with it by massive infra projects like the new maglev Shinkansen. So when we are talking about loans, we aren't just talking about consumer credit, although that can be a major component in a consumption-led economy.
Normally the downside to that is inflation, but since that's the goal anyway it seems like a win-win.
Poor people buying stuff they 'need' is different than coaxing businesses to invest more broadly with slightly cheaper loans but with the demographic decline still on their daily charts.