@solo-act:
You can print money. You can't print lives.
I know what you're saying, and I almost wholly agree. Certainly when it's lives-vs.-money-printing, you favor lives.
But don't forget the (negative) impact of "printing money." The whole volume of U.S. dollars in circulation (whether electronic or physical), taken together, is just a symbolic representation of the collective value of everything that anybody might want to pay for. (Or, at least, of the value of the things people are hoping to use
U.S. dollars to pay for.)
That value isn't accurately-and-objectively knowable, I guess, to anyone but God. Regardless, it's a certain value, which increases as people make-available new goods and services priced in dollars..., and which
decreases whenever stuff that
used to be valuable
ceases to be.
So you've got this giant collective pool of stuff and services, with whatever its
total current value is, being "chased" by dollars. And the value of any
single U.S. dollar is THAT total value,
divided by the number of dollars in circulation. If you print more dollars, but the
total value they're "chasing" hasn't increased, then each dollar becomes less valuable. If you
double the dollars in circulation, each dollar is
half as valuable.
Of course, markets aren't perfectly efficient and, after a big spate of (electronic) money-printing, most folk aren't immediately aware that their dollar now has less value. So the
first person to use a "brand new dollar" generally can use it to trade for more value than it's actually worth. (It's a form of arbitrage.)
And who has the first-use of those new dollars? Why, it's the banks connected to the Federal Reserve: They're the first to get hold of that new dollar, as they issue loans backed by those new ledger-entries. When
they spend it, each brand-new dollar still
has much of its old value because prices of goods and services haven't yet had time to increase in response to the flood of new dollars. So, when
they spend it they get nearly full value; but by the time it circulates to
your grandma's pocket, it's dropped down to its new lower value.
All of that is to say: We may have to do some money-printing here and there to dig ourselves out of a scrape, but there's no substitute for people actually working and inventing and trading: That's how the
real value gets created, which dollars only represent tiny slices of.
I would hate to see the doofuses in D.C. (since unlike coronavirus responses, all money-supply decisions are at the Federal level) decide to double the dollars in circulation, in order to pay for their stimulus, only to find that grandma now has 80% more dollars in her pocket, but her gallon of milk's price just
doubled.
It's a particularly sneaky way of shafting retirees, since they (unless they understand the scam) will
feel grateful to get that big check from the government. They don't realize their pocket has been cleverly picked. It's especially sneaky that it punishes those who spent their lives faithfully saving a bit of every paycheck, only to have it devalued into nonexistence by "quantitative easing."
So, yeah, you can print money. Sometimes you should: to prevent deflation, for example.
But it's the kind of thing y'don't want to lean on, unless you want to wind up like Venezuela, etc.