capitalism aside, money is a mechanism to bid on what you would like the world's productive capacity to do. if there is no money in the hands of consumers, it's an implicit bid for factories to be idled because there's no one to sell things to.

if you put money in the hands of consumers, they will bid up the prices of the reduced number of things on the market, _but_ they will not be implicitly bidding for factories to be idled.

there is a lot of productive capacity which, if it is idled, has a cost to bring back online. in a service economy, this is abstract -- people may have departed to look for new jobs, etc. -- but the best way to really bring the point home is to think about a steel mill.

you cannot shut down a steel mill, because it is full of molten steel. all of the crucibles, all of the furnaces, are full of molten metal. if you turn the steel mill off, everything is now full of solid metal. congratulations: you have a steel brick the size of a city block.

capitalism is vulnerable to seizing up like that, because capitalist planning (they will tell you they don't plan) relies on money constantly moving from sources of expenditure (ultimately, consumers) to sinks (companies making products, investing in capital, etc.)

in a recession, people imagine the money is gone.

but the money is measurement. it is not production capacity. what the superdole + PPP over the last six months did was to keep organized capacity (firms) from splintering while cash pumped to consumers from frozen money pools.

anyway, the thing which makes me so angry about the lack of stimulus is that it stimulating this economy is almost literally free. you just pump the money around and if there's inflation -- well, that sucks, but at least it's inflating away the principal on the stimulus deficit.