You're making the same mistake most people discussing these questions, by focusing on money.
Money is a convenient medium of exchange, and monetary policy is one of the many inputs into the economy. But at the end of the day, people don't care about money. You can't eat t-bills. Greenbacks won't put a roof and four walls around you, and you don't burn them to keep the lights on. What really matters, and what people really care about is wealth. Material wealth.
Wealth is only produced when people work. Whenever we talk about society as a whole 'not having the money' to afford something (Social security, social services, pensions, etc), money isn't the limiting factor. Our society's wealth is. And that wealth is measured in labour that goes towards producing useful goods and services - not in how fast money can be siphoned up by rent-seekers, or in how fast labour hours can be pissed away on make-work ditch-digging-and-ditch-filling.
Unlike money, you can't just magic up widgets into existence, by pretending to work.
On the one hand, labour participation is up. Productivity is higher than it has ever been in human history. But so is waste, active parasitism, and passive inefficiencies[1], due to the high upkeep requirements of modern societies.
[1] Car ownership is a great example of this. A mind-boggling amount of labour is poured into providing everyone with cars, and keeping them, and the infrastructure that they need running. And there's no practical way to opt out of it in most of North America. So much of the wealth we generate goes right back into maintaining the systems that we inflicted on ourselves.