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Comment by drewcoo | Hacker News Reader

> The current inflation episode is just the kind of event that the fiscal theory of the price level can easily describe. It’s simple. The US government printed up about $3 trillion of money and sent people checks. It borrowed an additional $2 trillion of money and sent people more checks.

Great. What was the faceless government's motivation?

Because clearly it wasn't the government that profited. But the people who did profit seem to own them some government.

Let's blame the government instead! That's worked since Reagan, right?

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> Great. What was the faceless government's motivation?

To stabilize society during a time when millions of people were unable to work due to a pandemic, obviously? I don’t think this is the gotcha you think it is.

Stabilization would have just meant replacing paychecks. At least in the US, people on unemployment were getting an additional $600/week on top of normal unemployment pay. Something like 10-20% of the workforce in the lowest bands made more on unemployment due to this scheme than they did from working.

It's not a stretch to question if there were additional motivations.

> What was the faceless government's motivation?

Keeping people from starving and employers from closing during a global pandemic where most of them couldn't work.

To be fair, the government created that problem too

In order to deal with the bigger problem of the mass death and an overwhelmed medical system in a pre-vaccine world.

It appears that places without lockdowns (Florida, Sweden) did as good or far better than places with severe lockdowns (California, New York). So I still don’t see the evidence despite all the spittle from supposed scientists who know such things.

> (Florida, Sweden) did as good or far better than places with severe lockdowns (California, New York)

That's just wildly wrong, FWIW. Per capita covid fatalities are 50% higher in Florida than California[1]. Sweden is even more of an outlier, fully three times more (per capita) Swedes are dead from covid than Norwegians.

[1] And only matches NY if you try to cook books by including the initial wave of fatalities from the initial outbreak that were contracted before lockdown.

> Sweden is even more of an outlier, fully three times more (per capita) Swedes are dead from covid than Norwegians.

I double checked your numbers and indeed I got that we had 3.09x deaths per capita compared to Norway. Also, we did have partial lockdown and many voluntary measures that were followed. Bars we closed down, restaurants were pretty restricted, there were measures on public transportation, many people used masks, very many people worked from home and there was mass testing and stay-at-home orders and such. So, I'm saying, it could have been even worse.

In short, you had a lockdown that was more severe than anything in the United States.

No, that's not the impression I have, but I wasn't in the US at the time. It was definitely more liberal than anywhere in Europe for sure though. Don't you remember all the articles about how Sweden is "doing nothing"?

https://www.bioinformaticscro.com/blog/states-ranked-by-age-...

Age adjusted deaths are basically equal for California and Florida, and vastly higher in NY.

Florida was essentially an open air party with no mask mandates way back in summer 2021. No one wants to look at reality.

"Age-adjusted death" has never been a term of art anywhere in the history on epidemiology. It's a term invented during the COVID-19 pandemic precisely to make the argument you are attempting here. It's wrong, and it's deliberately misleading.

I don’t think any amount of evidence will convince the never-freedom mask-forever types. The mass deaths and horrors beyond comprehension prophesied for those who dared walk maskless simply never happened.

Now you're moving goalposts and going weirdly ad-hominem. The subject was economics, whether saving 2-12M lives globally (extrapolation from the numbers under discussion) was worth a few quarters of heightened inflation. I don't recall anyone claiming you need "mass deaths and horrors beyond comprehension" to justify tolerating 8% inflation.

But given the actual measured impact? Yes, that seems undeniably tolerable to me. It's the right call.

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