Prices are a function of supply and demand, largely. New money being created and spent is only an issue when it durably creates more demand than supply can absorb. This is where inflation happens. With covid we had across the board stimulus that didn't care too much if supply was matching, but we also had supply disruptions everywhere.

This is incredibly hard (impossible?) to do in practice, but imagine that you create new money and use it to buy goods where supply can be perfectly adjusted in regards to demand. Now your money creation has zero effect on prices.

On top of that, a low level of inflation is actually a policy target. Low, but not null, because public policy wants to incentivize productive investment and not hoarding cash. And because deflation is much harder to curb (hello Japan) than inflation for a reasonably developed and productive economy.

This is my favorite article about inflation https://economicsfromthetopdown.com/2021/11/24/the-truth-abo...

Inflation is not simply a matter of the government adding more money to the supply (although that's one of the actions that can help reduce the value of currency)... the flow of money (and power) is immensely complex, and inflation as a measure is a procrustean bed (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procrustes)

Go do some reading about inflation vs deflation and also how bank loans actually work in reality. These topics are much too complicated for it to be worth my time here.

Let's say we have X amount of dollars. Time passes. The population increases, productivity increases, and now the economy (measured in actual stuff) is twice as big as it was. How many dollars should we now have?

If we have X, then each dollar is worth twice as much stuff (or, put differently, everything costs half as much). That's not a great outcome if, for example, you borrowed money to buy a house, and that loan specifies repayment of a fixed number of dollars. On the other hand, if you hid some dollars under your mattress, it's great. But it's unclear why society should want hiding dollars under your mattress to be the ideal investment strategy. That's not going to be optimal for society as a whole.

Or, we could have 2X dollars. Then each dollar will buy the same amount of stuff as before. That seems more reasonable. To do that, though, we have to increase the number of dollars in proportion to the growth of the economy as a whole.

(It's not that simple, of course. The velocity of money also matters. And the Fed is trying for 2% inflation, not zero.)