@Lord:
all of this is wrong
No, it's not. Most of the money in the world is completely imaginary, since we went off the Gold standard decades ago.
Most of the money deposited in banks is not actually kept by the bank. It's loaned out. When this happens, more money is now available to be spent, which has the effect of increasing the money supply of the country. For example, let’s say Person A deposits $100 in a bank, which means he has $100 he can spend. In accordance with Federal Reserve regulations, the bank is allowed to loan up to 90% of this money to someone else, say, Person B.
Once Person B has $90 in his bank account, this makes a total of $190 available to be spent. But his bank can loan up to $81 (90% of $90) to someone else. Now a total of $271 is available to be spent. And so on. In this way, the dollars that are deposited in a bank will, eventually, end up creating many more dollars in circulating money.
But that means a LOT of the money that exists, exists entirely on good faith. This generally isn't a problem, unless lots of people want to take out all their money all at once suddenly, as seen in the banking crisis documentary, Mary Poppins.
What the Fed is doing is basically saying "here's more imaginary money as a very short term loan with no interest rate." As a result, The Fed is basically, able to make temporary money from thin air by balancing securities. Aside from playing with existing imaginary money, it's also able to literally make cash that only exists to circulate once and then instantly burn it on the record books. They delete it quickly to try and avoid inflation, but they still created it to cover an initial cost.
The method is there for them to fund basically anything they want at little to no cost to anyone. And while they can't and shouldn't do that for literally everything and the new money can't stay in the wild too long (As doing so constantly would cause mass inflation,) it does prove the lie that "we can't afford to do any of these other things."
There's a way to make 1.5 trillion dollars temporarily in order to get things done, and they're demonstrating that now. It is and always has been in their power, so any arguments of "we can't afford to do important thing X" are BS.
You don't go and fund everything this way because that will break things, you do need to keep tax flow going, but once in a while you can create some money to aid in taking care of something important.
Also aside from that, there's the whole "we spend 700 billion on the military budget annually without blinking, but we can't spend a fraction of that to fix something actually important?
Not saying "yes, use 1.5 trillion to fund all these social programs, free money all the time" because it would be irresponsible to generate that much out of nowhere consistently, just "hey, we can solve world hunger… if we want to." Like, once every few years we can make say, 50-200 billion to bankroll a big socially important project BECAUSE its important without truly caring about the initial price tag and then slowly roll the ongoing cost into the budget.
