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Ansuz07 t1_j2e6kvh wrote

That's somewhat easy to say in hindsight when we don't have the ill effects of a more surgical program to compare. Its the key problem in economics - true experiments with control groups are incredibly rare, so we can rarely say which option was "best" with certainty.

A surgical program would have likely stemmed the inflation issue, but would also have likely taken much longer to execute, leaving people who needed funds without them for potentially months. It also would have "false negatives" - denying money entirely due to bureaucratic errors.

Whether or not that would have been worse than the partial impact it had on inflation is impossible to say.

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