This is not strictly true, and it&#x27;s important to this debate to understand why. The relevant equation is the equation of exchange: MV = PQ, where M is the supply of money, V is the velocity of money (how fast money gets spent), P is the price of goods, and Q is expenditures on goods and services (demand).<p>You&#x27;re suggesting that if you raise M, P goes up. But there&#x27;s two other possibilities, instead: Q goes up, or V goes down.<p>We actually did this experiment just recently, where we printed a whole bunch of money and dumped it into the economy (quantitative easing). We did NOT get inflation (increase in P), because V went way down over the same period - basically, the banks absorbed all of the money and didn&#x27;t invest it, so it didn&#x27;t actually move into the economy.<p>But if we gave money to poor people by printing currency, it&#x27;s likely that V <i>would</i> go up, because these people would actually spend all of that money, and the people they spent it with would spend it, etc.<p>It&#x27;s possible that in this situation, we WOULD get price inflation. But even in this case, that&#x27;s not clear - what might happen instead is that Q goes up - we would simply get a general increase in demand for goods and services, but prices would remain more or less stable.<p>The difference is whether you think that we are limited in productive capacity. Many (some?) economists think that the main problem with our economy is a severe lack of demand - people are just too poor to buy shit. If people wanted to buy more stuff, we&#x27;d have no problem making it - we have factories and factory factories. In this situation, if we give everyone a large fistful of cash, all that happens is we all suddenly get to be busy doing exactly what we want - making shit and enjoying the products - without a huge increase in price.<p>Price increases happen when people are demanding goods and services but we can&#x27;t produce enough to meet that demand. It&#x27;s possible this might happen if we print a bunch of money, but I think in our economy, where the main story is severe underemployment, where productive capacity is going to waste, where smart people who get PhDs don&#x27;t know what to do with themselves, this is not what would happen; we&#x27;re much more likely to see a long period of economic growth before we start to see inflation happening.