> Quantitative easing prevents the economy from completely shutting down, which helps everyone, not just the rich.

Could you describe "the economy completely shutting down"? Certain parts would absolutely shut shut down and be adversely affected, but I'm not convinced of the doomsday scenario here. Yes, lots of restaurants and services would close down (as they have, but in greater numbers), but this is the cost of not being prudent, buying insurance (if it was possible, and it certain was after SARS and MERS, etc), and saving for a rainy day. The economy will start up again, because there is always money to be made, and people are motivated to make that money.

The problem is that it's "helping" everyone, but disproportionately helping the rich, with no return on investment in the government. The highest ROI (in GDP terms) on investment by government usually comes from infrastructure last I checked (there's also been a really weird perturbation of what "infrastructure" means by the Biden administration), so propping up balance sheets for companies that should have saved for a rainy day is absurd.

Let them fire who they need to fire, then help those citizens directly, via the government programs that are literally built to do just that. 2T is enough to pay A LOT of money out to all citizens (again, some % of the full/part-time work force, which is some % of the total population of ~350M), and definitely tide them over for a year. Strategic/truly essential businesses (let's say hospitals, airlines, freight, etc) are given extra help, and that's that. I am a layman to be fair, so of course it's not this simple but I sure would have been more behind 2T given straight to people who became unemployed as a result, and letting that money trickle up back into the economy.

> If the Government can issue trillions of dollars in debt that mainly goes into regular people's pockets (stimulus checks, umemployment, 85% of PPP loans/grants, wages for pork jobs), then the Federal Reserve buying off an equal amount of debt shouldn't be seen as a stimulus for the rich.

This is wrong on it's face, and I think it's due to intentional misinformation by political actors. That first 2T stimulus (a lot of press was made about that number, it was almost fetishized) contained something like ~700B to households/household-adjacent programs, but what people overlooked was that the ~500B that went to businesses was leveraged up to 6x[0]:

> “We’ll have up to $4 trillion of liquidity that we can use to support the economy. And that’s —those are broad-based lending programs under Section 133. We can leverage our equity working with the Federal Reserve,” Mnuchin said on "Fox News Sunday," referring to a section of the Federal Reserve Act that gives the agency broad power to issue loans to borrowers who cannot secure loans.

When you take into account that these loans are going to be given at sweetheart rates, and maybe may not even be repaid (picking good lessees is hard), the popularly cited stat that "more money was allocated to households than businesses" is absolute bullshit. This is absolutely stimulus for the rich, who didn't need it to begin with, and arguably companies should have been just as prudent as we expect people to be.

[0]: https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/488879-fight-over-500-bi...