@steephie22 - This post refers to the OP - The problem with this argument is that you say, people will invest it and spend it as soon as they get it. What you must realise is that Money as we know it technically has no value. It's essentially just a piece of paper or whatever your currency is made off. The purpose of money is to act as a medium of exchange, as an economy which runs only of barter will not do well at all. For example, if a sociology teacher would want to go to the butchers to buy some beef, without the existence of money he would need to find a butcher happy to trade his beef for a sociology lesson. Alternatively if the sociology teacher wanted a piano lesson, he would have to find a piano teacher who wants a sociology lesson in exchange for a piano lesson. Having money limits this problem as it is an easy form of value of what your skills are worth to carry around. But without any goods or services to buy in an economy, your cash would be worthless. As it is worthless except for the fact that it's a medium of exchange.

Now, having printed more money, the reason it causes inflation is because you haven't actually become any richer. As noted before money is worthless unless you have something to use it on. And by simple printing money your economy hasn't produced any more goods or services. So your economy hasn't got any wealthier, therefore your extra money is worthless. As if you had all the money in the world, you could still only buy the same amount of things or invest into the same amount of people, as money is the only variable that has changed. So every extra unit of currency becomes more and more worthless with its worth gradually tending to 0 at infinity. As there is more money flowing round the economy, prices rise accordingly. As Inflation is a sustained rise in the price level, and price level's are rising. Inflation occurs as a result of printing money.

Why is inflation bad? Well truth be told it isn't. That's why economies have inflation targets. This policy has only been around for 23 years since it was introduced in New Zealand in 1990. The UK inflation target is 2% of the Consumer Price Index, (+/- 1 percentage point) But the bracketed part if often ignored. Whereas the EU inflation target is >2%
As you may have noted these developed economies AIM for having inflation, but they want their inflation to be LOW! This is because low and stable inflation is healthy for an economy.
With prices slowly rising this encourages spending in an economy which increases consumer expenditure and investment as money is losing value. Both components of Aggregate expenditure which contribute to short run GDP growth, which is good for an economy.

However a high level of inflation is BAD! This is because it may lead to things such as wage price spirals and completely diminishes confidence within an economy. People buy things as soon as they get money. You could see this in the post world war Germany when it was experiencing hyperinflation. Where people were literally rushing to shops with overflowing wheelbarrows of cash trying to spend it as soon as they can. This leads to more and more demand, which outpaces the supply, which causes even greater price rises thus even more inflation, eventually the currency just loses all value and credibility, such as can be seen in Zimbabwe who were eventually forced to scrap the use of their own currency, and started using various other currencies, notably US dollars and South African Rands.

Alternatively Deflation is also bad, as people try to wait as long as they can before spending their money, as the value of their cash is rising every day. This completely slows down consumer spending, leader to firms going bust, less tax to governments through VAT etc. Business having to fire workers due to reduced profits due to no customers etc. Deflation is BAD! VERY BAD!!! In 99% of modern economics.

You may wonder then, why are governments insisting on printing so much money then. It's mostly to counteract the fear of deflation in their sluggish economies. As an economy is probably better of with a higher inflation rate of around 5-10% than deflation which completely brings an economy to a standstill. This could be seen in the UK in 2008-2009 when there were 2 sets of quantitative easing the first being to counter the free falling rate of inflation which was occurring in 2008 as the economy was in the early stages of the recession. This is because had this action not been taking, the UK economy would have very likely have experienced deflation. And using Japan as an example, it's easy to see how deflation has plagued the Japanese economy for around 30 years now. The UK desperately wanted to avoid this


I don't know if I really answered your question, but if not I hope my basic economics lesson will give you some more information to help build a better understanding of the topic. I didn't really want to go into to much depth to confuse you too much but as a conclusion

Printing Money = Inflation

Low Inflation =Good (Depends on other economy variables of printing money is worthwhile )
High Inflation = Bad (Definitely don't print more money)
Deflation = Bad (Print money, along side other expansionary fiscal and monetary policies, anything to get rid of the deflation)

Hope this helps, if you have any specific questions relating to what I said, feel free to ask away.