Friedman's economic models depended largely upon a lie that he built into his equations. That was treating the velocity of money as a constant across all situations. If it had been true, much of our current economic division and inequality would not have happened.
However, it was seriously in error and depended upon the assumed virtue of those who received the money first in the famous "trickle down" model so widely accepted by the modern world and put into practice by neo-cons and neo-liberals who made policy. The policy makers knew that the average working class voter equated their government's spending with their kitchen table budgeting and could easily be made to believe that "their" tax money was funding the government programs that kept the poor from sinking too low to participate in the economy.
It wasn't that those programs were particularly effective at preventing poverty, which even Christ said would always be with us, but it provided a way to automatically inject newly created money in a countercyclical manner to the business cycle. Restricting those injections, primarily out of a misguided attempt to "balance the budget" (as opposed to balancing the economy), has caused the people to finance their own economy and the resources and labor used by their governments with private sector bank credit.
The primary driver that perpetuates this grand lie is the manufactured fear of inflation caused by "printing money". Only by ignoring the contribution of real resources and labor availability can this even pass first inspection by even the least econ-literate among us. The US has been, for decades, trying to create a low level of inflation without success. At the same time, Japan has thrown money creation at its economy at a previously unseen rate without incurring "monetary" inflation. The old "inflation will devalue existing dollars if more dollars are printed" has been thoroughly debunked and should no longer be a part of any conversation among economists and policy makers and is now relegated to propaganda status to preserve the status quo..
