Seems the opposite to me, especially when if you add post-2010 to the data set:

There was hardy any useful stimulus in the US post-2008 because Obama (D) was in the Whitehouse and the GOP-controlled Congress didn't want to help him out. So it was mostly just monetary policy (Fed) that did things, and it was a long slog of pain to get unemployment down and get the economy going.

With COVID we had monetary policy (as before) but also fiscal policy (Treasury), and I think that fewer people suffered economically. Especially since the Fed can only work 'internal' to the financial system, but it takes the Treasury to get cheques-in-hands.

(Certainly the two scenarios are not directly compatible, but it seems obvious to me that fiscal can have more direct impact on regular people's lives, e.g., average savings rate increased.)

The 2008-ish recession saw the Fed pay banks to keep money off the market. No wonder that economic activity remained sluggish.

For the 2020 recession, you had the Fed drop reserve requirements for bank, and move to average inflation targeting, and in general move much more aggressively.

See also Japan: since the 1990s they had a long history of fiscal stimulus and monetary tightness. When Abe came to power a few years ago, he loosened monetary policy, and the Japanese nominal GDP started to grow again.

Monetary and fiscal are largely equivalent

specially when the central bank has the tendency to print money to buy government debt, so public solvency is never an issue

You can easily reverse monetary stimulus: just sell those assets that the central bank bought.

You can't really reverse fiscal stimulus. Once you paid people to dig holes and cover them again, you can't really get that money back.

Yes, public solvency is not an issue for governments that borrow in their own currency. But that's a separate concern.

> Once you paid people to dig holes and cover them again, you can't really get that money back.

That doesn't matter though? If someone's unemployed, their labor is wasted, and you can't get it back. The money spent is not destroyed, it re-enters the economy when the workers you gave it to immediately spend it, and comes back to the government when they pay income or sales tax.

You can reverse fiscal stimulus by putting up taxes.

> The money spent is not destroyed, it re-enters the economy when the workers you gave it to immediately spend it, and comes back to the government when they pay income or sales tax.

Be careful to keep the nominal and the real separate.

Destroying money is great! The Fed can just print more to make up the difference.

Equivalently buying stuff from China, and China hoarding the money they got forever is great, too. You got stuff, and the Chinese only got some database entries.

> If someone's unemployed, their labor is wasted, and you can't get it back.

Yes. (Though the leisure they enjoy isn't necessarily completely worthless. But let's ignore that for now.)

And we find that in general the private sector makes more productive use of people's labour (in real terms). Especially when compared not to the day-to-day running of existing civil servants, but to make-work schemes.

The Fed 'printing' money increases private sector spending and private sector employment.

> You can reverse fiscal stimulus by putting up taxes.

Taxes don't remove the money from the hands of the people you paid to dig the holes and cover them up again.

More importantly: taxes have substantial deadweight losses. Taxes cause real productivity losses.

(Just to be clear: I'm all in favour of financing the government from taxes that have low or zero deadweight losses, like property taxes or land value taxes.)

Selling assets from the central bank balance sheet on the open market has no deadweight losses.

> You can easily reverse monetary stimulus: just sell those assets that the central bank bought.

You can do that.... but watch the markets tumble and the interest rates skyrocket... and the politicians and bankers panic!

Maybe, but that's a different issue.