Once again, I'm not the one you need to convince.
As a progressive, you are exactly the one that needs to be convinced so you can navigate around the "how ya gonna pay for it?" argument that always derails the progressive agenda.
I know committed liberals who both agree with your basic analysis that corporations are creating most of the current high prices and ALSO believe that "printing money" to pay for social benefits and infrastructure improvements is inevitably inflationary.
Those are liberals that have been conditioned to frame economics in the language of the oppressor, which puts them at a disadvantage from the start. Conservatives understand this instinctively, which is why they never fear advocating for tax cuts that have the same impact on the budget/economy as spending in deficit.
Whenever I hear someone say "printing money" I know they don't understand macro-econ in federal finance. It shows you consider money to be a tangible thing that must be "found" and that creating more of it to fund the public purpose has a trade-off in its value. US dollars are the only tool government has to deploy resources and labor in the private sector so they are available to purchase.
The need to pay taxes in the government's unit of account provides the incentive to commerce to adopt that unit of account as its currency, but the government never "needs" its currency back to enable its spending. It only needs us to need its currency so it is not revenue constrained. Can it spend too much to fund something and drive the price of those resources up? Sure, but that is why we try to elect people who are responsible and somewhat intelligent. Even so, increasing the price of one resource needed doesn't flow over into other resources.
There is no economic advantage to society for not feeding kids or providing healthcare and education to everyone. Seniors eating cat food at the end of every month is not economically beneficial to our nation. These are values that all progressives/liberals should consider as basic right of life issues. If sufficient food isn't available it is the duty of Congress to spend whatever is required to boost production, not simply tell a percentage of people they aren't able to eat at the end of the month. Ditto with healthcare, housing, and any other necessity that the people require to live and prosper.
If a Social Security only allows a senior to eat 20 days per month and there is sufficient food potentially available to feed them for the entire month there is nothing inflationary about increasing that benefit to deploy food production as needed. The 10 days of meals funded at the end of the month will not cost more than the meals in the first 20 days. It is always the potential availability of resources that determines the price, not the amount of money available. A "competitive" free market system will always increase production up to its maximum before raising prices.
However, as soon as one moves from those basic rights into the numbers game they are disadvantaged by myths that have become so pervasive that they are almost taken as gospel, and they never benefit the left's view of society. Most of those myths originated with a pegged currency (gold standard) that hasn't been our reality since '34, but the monetary system was never forced to adapt to the fiat currency. It instead instituted rules that force the government to continue gold standard based procedures (debt ceiling, bond issues for "funding", etc), thus forcing neoliberalism on our economy.
Increase the supply of any product in the market and you almost always decrease its price. Why are dollars different?
Dollars are not a commodity. They are a unit of measure mandated by our government (via taxation) that measures commodities, much like inches or pounds. At the most basic level, they allow us to disconnect from barter, informing us how many chickens are equal to a cow and making it possible to sell those chickens today and purchase a cow in the future.
As such, dollars will always be worth one tax credit toward our liability to our government, regardless of how many of them are in circulation. Prices of things sold may fluctuate according to the supply of those things, but never because the supply of money increases. Inflation is simply a rough accounting for the price of a standardized list of commodities and goods, not a real thing related to money.
Unless and until the majority of Americans are persuaded that this classic is untrue many, if not most, will continue to believe that the $6 trillion in Covid rescue spending is directly responsible for $5 a gallon gas and $6 a dozen eggs.
That spending prevented a total collapse of our economy and "replaced" private sector demand that failed miserably early in the pandemic. It wasn't added "on top of" the normal GDP from the pre-pandemic economy. This, despite opinion concerning how we coddle those who need help, is the "purpose" of our automatic safety nets. They inject "new" money creation into exactly the right place and at the right time to prevent massive supply chain collapses.
You might not approve of this if your ideology favors a workforce heavily dependent upon the whims of its employers for its necessities, but it is the reality of our society and economy. Hunger, ignorance, and bad health are never conducive to a peaceful and progressive society, but it appears that some feel they are necessary to motivate people to be productive. It's hardly surprising that this opinion is mainly forwarded by those who contribute the least valuable thing to our economy, the capital that we have in limitless supply as a society and currency-creating government.
