You aren't wrong, let's start with that. But I think we might be talking past one another.

I did a deep dive this morning on the Federal Reserve's contribution to inflation, and it looks to me like interest rate hikes contradict quantitative easing. I think they had no choice but to lend more money during the pandemic, or else we might have faced the total loss of personal savings and a global depression. So they made up for that by raising interest rates later in an attempt to slow inflation. We can argue about the amounts, but their $7 trillion contribution just isn't that much when measured against the US's $23 trillion GDP IMHO.

I also stumbled onto an interesting insight. Most of our economic policies since Reagan have followed Milton Friedman. That's where the Fed's quantitative easing comes in, because it's based on the quantity theory of money (QTM) from David Hume and John Stuart Mill:

https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/042015/how-does-mon...

Keynesian economics (an alternative approach) rejects QTM and says that inflation comes from demand-pull and cost-push. To me this is self-evident, because even with no change in money supply, prices will rise due to increased demand when supply decreases because people are out of work.

Just so we're both on the same page, here's an alternative interpretation of inflation from the Reserve Bank of Australia, which examines demand-pull, cost-push and inflation expectations instead of QTM:

https://www.rba.gov.au/education/resources/explainers/causes...

Although they practiced quantitative easing in 2022 just like we did, and reached a similar 7% inflation rate. Which seems to indicate that they had no choice, meaning that inflation was structural outside the US too, and not due to a specific economic or political approach.

Notably, China began flirting with Keynesian economics in the late 90s. Here's an opinion piece from fee.org, which hosts the one I found supporting your initial argument:

https://fee.org/articles/chinas-flirtation-with-keynesian-ec...

Since that time, China's economy has grown exponentially and now they're eating our lunch:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_supply#/media/File:China...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_supply

So you say that capitalism still works, but this data challenges that assumption on a number of levels.

IMHO the financial elites of the world are effectively gamblers who make long bets on how this will all play out. Based on these figures, where are they most likely to place their bets for the best return? China and the developing nations it influences.

The propaganda against progressivism, socialism and communism is a knee-jerk reaction to the two lost decades we've had in the time since, as US wages have stagnated and we've lost our industrial capacity, including the closing of 70,000 factories, which began when the George W. Bush administration did nothing to stop outsourcing, and pretty much endorsed it to enrich its wealthy contributors with short-term gains:

https://checkyourfact.com/2018/04/12/fact-check-did-the-us-l...

The US is gradually losing its petro-dollar dominance and will probably lose its global policing and empire-building abilities by the middle of this century. We'll have to start producing and paying our own way again, not just run huge trade deficits and continue importing cheap goods. A similar thing happened when England lost its colonies.

So now we're colonizing ourselves in the search for cheap labor. At least we were until the pandemic, but people woke up. Now we see how wealth comes mostly from being born with it or skimming it from workers. A point proven every day by our leading billionaires.

If wealth doesn't come from hard work or saving, that creates cognitive dissonance. Which is the best explanation I can find for stuff like the former president's election.

And that's the real danger in all of this. Not that the US might adopt democratic socialism, but that exploited and disenfranchised workers around the world could elect authoritarian leaders in a misguided attempt to thwart their oppression, which could lead to WWIII.

So price gouging doesn't come just from monopoly, but from the wealthy elites created by those monopolies who effectively control our government now. They're the conspiracy. They could use their wealth to alleviate human suffering, but they're still asleep. In other words, there's nobody at the wheel advocating for progressive change who has the means to actually enact it. Only outreach and organizing can do that. The fate of the world quite literally depends on it.

Anyway, I'm well outside my wheelhouse here, and we're below the fold so nobody will probably ever read this anyway. But I hope this clears up my position. I have no terse way to defend it, because the evidence is vast and suppressed by the mainstream media and wealthy elites who don't benefit from a reduction in wealth inequality.

Edit: I re-read your original comment, and maybe we both agree that it would have been more effective to just give everyone the $40,000 directly? Just like during the housing bubble popping in 2008, when people needed a few thousand dollars to make their mortgage payments, but the government gave the money to the banks instead, which prolonged the recession. To not print the money is not a viable option IMHO, for the reasons I stated above.