Comment by majormajor

> No we're not. If we weren't, we shouldn't have seen the massive inflation near the end of covid. The supply disruptions hit almost immediately, but it wasn't until the stimmy checks hit that inflation went up.

What? The first Covid stimulus checks were April 2020. 271 billion in 2020 here per here: https://www.pgpf.org/article/what-to-know-about-all-three-ro.... 135B of the second round by Mar 2021. The third started about then. Inflation - and consumer activity in most areas - was low because nobody was going anywhere still, but at least we did a fair job of avoiding mass unemployment and homelessness.

Then inflation started accelerating during the economy's broader reopening in April 2021 (2.6 -> 4.2 percent from March). It didn't peak until near the end of 2022. Those stimulus checks were LONG gone by then for most people, since a huge portion of the country lives paycheck to paycheck, and the stimulus checks weren't available to people making more than 80-100k (single or avg-per-person in a married couple), which is the higher-income demographic that would have the disposable income to really drive inflation across the board by a "let's buy stuff we wouldn't otherwise" splashy purchase.

Instead, inflation was driven by people getting back out and doing/buying all the shit that had all been scaled down. The first stimulus checks didn't drive it because people weren't purchasing as broadly yet, and were still more in panic mode. Textbook bullwhip effect; at steady state we produced more than enough and never saw shortages, then in Covid demand types and volumes shifted enough to cause shortages of certain things and surpluses of far more other "non-quarantine consumer" things, so production changed, and then when things started to go back to normal ALL those things got hit again. I don't know if I'd agree that we're "massively" overproducing everything now that we're not in a quarantine scenario again, but the consistency of supply of most normal things suggests a lot of excess capacity in the system to absorb normal fluctuations in a way that nobody ever has to think about where their next roll of toilet paper is coming from again.