[makomk]

That money has already gone out to people though. The reason that people's pay has bought less than before is that a large chunk of the economy was shut down and those goods and services were not produced. This means that there is simply no way for people to be able to purchase as much as they did before because it's just not there to buy in the first place. Shutting down the ports makes this worse by preventing US-based factories from getting the inputs to operate and non-US-based factories shipping their products to Americans. This is effectively making the whole country poorer in real terms as leverage to try and get a bigger share of what's left.