Do you think that the current economy is ginning at an optimal output?

I don't know what "optimal output" is. Can the economy produce more? Of course it can. What's stopping it? Ah, an interesting and complicated question. There are a lot of constraints, both local and global -- I would say the biggest is the level of technology -- and they are binding in different places. As I mentioned earlier, I do not think that the availability of capital is a major constraint at the moment. In fact, we have a glut of cheap money.

I think that a lot of actors in our economy get stuck 'waiting for the check' to get started on production

That's possible, but why do you think these actors would generate value? It's entirely possible for them to just waste resources. The fact that they have not been able to secure financing indicates that they do not have a convincing plan of creating value.

s there some data/study you can point to that says that faster velocity doesn't increase production?

Just get yourself a plot of GDP and a plot of money velocity over time. See how correlated they are and whether you think there is a causal connection.

In any case, velocity is a calculated number -- it's just GDP divided by money supply (and you can use different money supplies -- the monetary base, M2, M3, etc. to get a velocity for each of them).

a consumer may be willing to pay the increased price charged because the consumer will be getting that value back in the future

That's the financial equivalent of lending money to the seller. Why would a consumer be interested in becoming a creditor for all purchases?

I think the empirical data is there for the r > g problem

I think that's not quite true. Yes, Piketty has written a book. Not everyone agrees with its conclusions.

I think doing something is better than nothing.

Really, you don't think there is a good chance to royally screw things up if you make radical changes with uncertain consequences?

Actually the theory is that we can hold inflation at 0 by printing decaying dollars when we need them and decaying them faster when there is too much.

So what's stopping the current central banks from easily controlling inflation now in this way? Japan, for example, have been trying to get out of deflation for many years. It printed a lot of yen. Inflation is still negligible.

agree to disagree?

Sure. As long as your proposals are not mandatory :-)

If you aren't willing to pay for the feel good fluff, do you at least want it to happen?

Depends on what. For some things I don't care and for some things I expect voluntary consumer choice to be not an effective method to achieve anything useful.

If not, are you cool with the status quo going forward as long as prices always get smaller?

Status quo as in what we have now? I would prefer things to get better, of course, but I'm not holding my breath :-) I am a social pessimist -- I believe people have a vast capacity to fuck things up...