My favorite thought experiment to play with people is "what if, instead of printing $8 trillion and giving it directly to banks to just speculate and sit on, the Fed bought every supermarket chain in the United States and used its infinite money printer to print the money to keep buying the goods, and then they just make everything in the supermarkets free." It's perfect. The math works out great. In fact, it's way cheaper! And it's very hard to argue that this would not be a better economic stimulus than just giving money to banks. The only argument against it is "but that's communism!!!" or "line must go up."
My favorite thought experiment to play with people is "what if, instead of printing $8 trillion and giving it directly to banks to just speculate and sit on, the Fed bought every supermarket chain in the United States and used its infinite money printer to print the money to keep buying the goods, and then they just make everything in the supermarkets free." It's perfect. The math works out great. In fact, it's way cheaper! And it's very hard to argue that this would not be a better economic stimulus than just giving money to banks. The only argument against it is "but that's communism!!!" or "line must go up."