It is easy to forget that the Fed's mission is to stabilize the value of money, not to conform to some concept of fairness. I would also point out that instability in the value of money disproportionately impacts the poor, who have the least savings available to deal with price shocks (if you are living paycheck to paycheck, then the price of bread suddenly doubling will leave you eating half as much bread).
The Fed's activity is what drives the government's ability to pay it's contractors.
If you want to increase the money supply, print some money and give it out.
If you want to fund highway construction, figure out how much it will cost and then raise that amount of tax revenue to pay the builders.
Without sarcasm, given the latest purchases of assets beyond Treasuries and MBS, why do you think the Federal Reserve has purchased assets at market rates?
I'd see the problem if it worked how I've sometimes seen it described, where rich people and banks are just getting free gifts of cash, but that's not accurate.
Congress could give the Fed the power to, rather than just buy bonds (or whatever it is they do) introduce money to the economy simply by giving everyone money.
I understand that it is not exactly true that the rich are getting free money for nothing. But the whole reason we're talking about this here is that someone pointed out that all the new money supply from the Fed is finding its way straight to people and corporations that don't have anything better to do with it than buy assets, the prices of which continue to grow as a result, even while the GDP rate is plummeting.
Lastly, I'm totally open to the idea that someone will come along and explain to me why my idea for how the Fed should give everyone money is just not workable. If that happens, I'll be happy to have learned something useful. But it's definitely not clear to me, a priori, why it wouldn't work if it wouldn't.
The job of financing ventures should be done by private parties and the banking industry, not by government, but since they are too preoccupied chasing assets with cheap money they can't be bothered to.
Congress decides how the money is distributed when they're spending it.
