A smaller CARES Act would have still been as helpful as it needed to be, but would have stimulated more normal growth and a bit less inflation. How much less? I don't know. Maybe 2-3 percentage points?
It's hard to draw firm conclusions because pandemic inflation is fundamentally different than ordinary inflation. Still, even though the supply side of things was unusual (caused by product shortages due to COVID), we still wouldn't have had any inflation if we'd skipped the stimulus entirely and allowed incomes and consumption to decline. It was our determination to keep people whole that produced stable consumption desires in the face of product shortages, leading to inflationary pressure.
My guess is that a stimulus sufficient to address a recession is almost always going to produce some unwanted inflation. We just don't have the capability to fine tune things precisely enough to avoid it, and it's better to err on the side of maintaining growth even if that risks more inflation than we'd like. I like the tradeoff we made for COVID (strong growth, too much inflation) way more than the tradeoff we made for the Great Recession (slow growth, normal inflation).
It's hard to draw firm conclusions because pandemic inflation is fundamentally different than ordinary inflation. Still, even though the supply side of things was unusual (caused by product shortages due to COVID), we still wouldn't have had any inflation if we'd skipped the stimulus entirely and allowed incomes and consumption to decline. It was our determination to keep people whole that produced stable consumption desires in the face of product shortages, leading to inflationary pressure.
My guess is that a stimulus sufficient to address a recession is almost always going to produce some unwanted inflation. We just don't have the capability to fine tune things precisely enough to avoid it, and it's better to err on the side of maintaining growth even if that risks more inflation than we'd like. I like the tradeoff we made for COVID (strong growth, too much inflation) way more than the tradeoff we made for the Great Recession (slow growth, normal inflation).