Either way, the money isn’t just given away, it’s borrowed and there’s some sort of note or bond securing it.
It’s obvious that neither increasing the money supply nor deficit spending alone causes inflation. Just look at the last four decades with big increases in both the money supply and deficit spending yet very low inflation.
Now if the government borrows money and gives it to consumers, as they did with the stimulus payments, they can stimulate a lot of demand and if the supply of goods isn’t there you get inflation.
The short answer to your question is you get the money by borrowing it, by your employer borrowing it and paying you, or by transfer payments from the government.
Prior to 2008 during the financial crisis, when the government ran deficits, they issued T-bills borrowing the money from anyone who would buy the T-bills, promising to pay the money back at various times, depending on the maturity of bonds.
In 2008 the Federal Reserve began actually directly buying the bonds from the Federal Government, hence the term Quantitative Easing, basically the Federal Reserve creates whatever amount of money it wants to cover the cost of government.
In addition, the Federal Reserve around 2008 started buying up private assets like Mortgage-Backed Securities, etc. With the stated goal to stabilize the markets by removing bad assets from banks.
All that money the Federal Reserve paid for T-bills and Private assets has filtered thru banks into the private economy, keeping interest rates low and encouraging consumption, it’s taken quite a few years, but Covid has proven to be the trigger to setoff this inflation, trillions were sent to the private sector to essentially consume without working.
What has happened, we’ve seen housing prices and rental rates skyrocket to a point middle income families can’t afford to pay, even though interest rates have remained historically low which further fueled asset inflation.
The stock market has skyrocketed over the last decade, basically we’ve had massive asset inflation of stocks, housing, etc.
The Biden Administration came in and destroyed the energy sector and with the help of Republicans threw more money to consumer.
Now you have a combination of dramatic asset price increases, fuel price increase, food price increase, inflation has come to everyday consumer inflation.
And we have complete idiots running things which only makes things worse.
Buckle up the next few years will be really hard on just about everyone.