Wealth is measured by how much material objects and services you can buy, not by the actual numbers in your bank account. If you literally added a zero to everyone's bank account overnight, what would happen? There'd be some turmoil, but essentially pretty quickly a zero would be added to every price in every store, and we'd be exactly back to square 1.

When the government suspended student loan payments (and started paying extra time for staying home, and other pandemic benefits), it indirectly put cash in the hands of people who were used to living month-to-month. No doubt some were fiscally responsible and put the money in stocks, which made the stock market have a crazy big rally, but that's a different story. Most just went out and bought things they might not have bought otherwise, or which they had been waiting/saving for. But the supply of things didn't increase--in fact if anything the supply went down because of part shortages. What happens when demand goes up and supply goes down? Prices skyrocket. And this is measured as increased consumer prices (aka inflation).

Now the supply shortage has been mostly worked out, but prices remain high. They are sticky--that's the actual, technical term. A demand shock is required to unstick prices, a core part of getting inflation under control. Suddenly reducing the available monthly budget of those same people who were driving inflation in the first place would do that. So resume student loan payments.

There's no way it'll happen before the next presidential election, however.

Your example undermines your point — in the face of actual, material ability of people to live more than month-to-month and have an actual nice thing, well, we have widespread shortages lasting for years.

Supply shortages lasted months, not years, and are largely over. Chip shortages are an exception. People did buy a lot more than they had been buying previously. This is very well documented.

It's been three years and prices have yet to come down. Interest rates have soared, and who knows how that's going to make new stuff appear. It's quite probable prices will never return to 2018 levels, and somehow this is the result of a temporary increase in people buying stuff. The system is fucked.

That’s inflation and sticky prices for you. The prices won’t go down. There was too much free money given away in the pandemic for that. But steps could be taken to reduce interest rates, if there was political will. Resuming student loan payments (and interest) would go a long way towards that.

Wealth is increased by what money can buy (availability and accessibility of goods), not by the number on the currency you hold.

If that was the case, then Zimbabwe made a massive mistake when switched to the US dollar after having had to print 1, 10 and 100 trillion dollar notes because inflation was pushing 230,000,000 percent.

Well, unfortunately, yes. It's a sad fact that economy, or wealth in general, builds upon inequalities, otherwise there is no need to put regards between the rich and the poor, and there is no need to compare each other.