A biased source, but still, the facts and numbers suggest that the ARP has proven to be a success and was not the sole, or maybe even predominant cause of inflation.
The economy is driven by the working class. Bail them out during an economic crisis (rather than our sometimes used socialism for the rich - capitalism for the poorly approach and you see record breaking economic recovery.
There was another key factor in deciding to err on the side of more support rather than less. If the initial bill fell short, the President could not count on Congress to offer more help. History taught that passing a second recovery bill would be tough, even with the President’s party in charge of Congress. But if the bill happened to be too large, and the economy began to overheat, the Federal Reserve had the capacity to tap the brakes by raising interest rates—which were near zero percent at the time.
The President proposed his package shortly before entering office, and deliberations with Congress resulted in his original plan passing largely unchanged. The final bill provided roughly $1.5 trillion in direct relief to individuals and state and local governments. (While the total cost of the ARP was closer to $1.9 trillion, the remaining funds went to COVID vaccine distribution, K-12 school reopening, and other important efforts apart from financial stabilization.) State and local governments received hundreds of billions of dollars to fill budget holes and avoid painful cuts to payrolls or to badly needed housing and nutrition programs. Working-class adults and their children each received $1,400 stabilization checks. The unemployed got $300 in enhanced weekly benefits, which bought them additional time and financial flexibility to find a good job as businesses reopened. An expanded child tax credit provided parents with young children with as much as $1,600 more per child. Billions of dollars for lower-income homeowners and renters helped keep people in their homes even as foreclosure and eviction moratoria expired.
The President’s decision to plan for uncertainty quickly proved prescient. Shortly after the ARP passed, serious economic headwinds emerged. Two separate COVID variants—Delta in the summer of 2021 and Omicron that winter—led to spikes in infection rates and deaths, deterred people from returning to work, and set back reopening efforts. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in early 2022 disrupted global markets for oil, wheat, and other commodities, and intensified supply chain disruptions. Yet through it all, the ARP kept pushing America’s recovery forward, even as other leading economies sagged under the weight of these global events.
The benefits of the ARP can be seen in nearly every economic measure. Economic growth soared. Moody’s, an independent economic analysis firm, estimated that inflation-adjusted (or “real”) U.S. economic growth in 2021 without the ARP would have been 3 percent. Instead, real U.S. economic growth nearly doubled that estimate, reaching 5.7 percent—one of the strongest years on record. In fact, out of all the world’s leading economies, the United States is the only country to have returned to its pre-pandemic growth trend. From an American growth perspective, it is as if the pandemic-induced recession never happened.
The ARP sharply accelerated job growth as well. Before the ARP, the United States was on pace to recover the jobs lost in the pandemic by mid-2024. Instead, America hit that milestone in mid-2022—and has added four million more jobs in the year and a half since then. Moody’s found that of the nearly seven million jobs created in 2021, four million were attributable to the passage of the ARP.
More jobs brought a steeper decline in the unemployment rate. When the ARP passed in March 2021, 4.2 million people had been unemployed for roughly six months or more. By July 2022, it was less than 1.2 million people—nearly the same number of long-term unemployed as in the month before the pandemic struck. That rapid turnaround was a sharp contrast with the recovery from the 2008 financial crisis, when it took eight years for the number of long-term unemployed to return to pre-crisis levels.
The drop in unemployment was also uniquely broad-based. Past recoveries had offered quick progress for white, well-educated workers but only sluggish progress for other groups. That was not the case with the post-ARP recovery: The unemployment rates for Black workers, Hispanic workers, and workers with disabilities all fell to the lowest levels on record—as did the gap between the Black and white unemployment rates. And the unemployment rate for workers with only high school degrees also dropped below 4 percent, near a record low.
Measures of financial distress markedly improved. Evictions—which typically shoot up during economic downturns—actually declined, even after moratoria on evictions expired. Individual bankruptcy filings dropped and ultimately settled at a lower level than before the pandemic began.
The financial stability that the ARP provided also helped support a burst of entrepreneurship. Most entrepreneurs start a new business with their own funds or funds from friends and family. During an economic downturn, people usually have less money to draw on to make this initial investment. During the Great Recession following the 2008 financial crisis, for example, new business applications declined for two straight years. But in 2021 and 2022, more Americans applied to start new businesses than over any two-year period on record. Once more, this upswing was broad-based, with business ownership rates for Black and Hispanic households shooting up sharply. By giving working-class people the financial wherewithal to take a risk and fund a new venture, the ARP helped lay the foundation for an unprecedented boom in entrepreneurship.
For ARP critics, the 2021 and 2022 surge in inflation was too steep a price to pay for all these extraordinary economic outcomes. That would be a questionable claim even if the ARP were solely responsible for the inflation America experienced during this recovery. But at most, the ARP played a partial role. Researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco—who acknowledge that their estimate is at the higher end of the range—assessed that the ARP, along with the trillions in additional fiscal support during the Trump Administration, contributed roughly 3 additional percentage points to inflation in 2021. Given that annual inflation peaked at more than 9 percent in June 2022, the United States still would have experienced historically high inflation in 2021 and 2022 even in the absence of the ARP.
The relevant counterfactual, therefore, is a world in which the ARP never passed and the United States had to contend with still-high inflation along with softer growth, higher unemployment, fewer small businesses, and lower wages than it has now. That is the scenario many other countries are currently experiencing. Each of them would happily trade places with us today, especially because the United States has been able to bring inflation back down near the Fed’s target without a sharp rise in unemployment.
https://democracyjournal.org/magazine/7 ... scue-plan/
I’m not sure how they do it but always people buying it so volume I guess 
