In the early, panicked days of the pandemic, the United States government did something that was previously unimaginable. It transformed itself, within weeks, into something akin to a European-style welfare state.
Congress rapidly fortified the social safety net, making it much stronger than at any point. It made policies like Medicaid and food stamps more generous. It created new federal benefits like paid sick and caregiving leave, and free school lunches. And it made some pandemic benefits, like stimulus checks and child allowances, nearly universal. The government is estimated to have spent about $5 trillion helping individuals and businesses since March 2020.
Since then, most of it has been disbanded.
We only did the fun part, the public spending. We did not raise taxes in any way, shape, or form.
Essentially we conducted an immense experiment in Modern Monetary Theory….for which we got a level of inflation that in the long run may hit us very hard.