Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let’s take time to discuss this, as it’s easier to discuss when it happens to another country with an entirely different social system. I was surprised, last year, that techniques we were condescending about, and saying it only happens in China, were applied in Europe and USA. As if it was an emergent property of a human group facing a new disease.
Talks about how magic money doesn’t exist but then printing out checks for everyone and it materially helping loads of people was definitely an Overton window shifter as well. There are principles and a status quo, and it always stays the same… until it changes.
There was no magic money tree. It took a while for the effects to spread to the whole of the economy - perhaps because people were in lockdown and limited in their ability to spend money - but throughout the western world people's incomes have been dropping in real inflation-adjusted terms. There's no way that they couldn't; a large chunk of the economy was shut down and producing nothing, so there's just plain less stuff to buy which means people can't possibly be able to continue consuming the same amount. Printing and handing out checks just redistributed where in society the economic pain was felt for a while.