well, look at that oil chart again:
oil was maxxed out. but it was pretty flat overall. then, a sharp decrease in energy costs (caused by an increase in production) slashed transportation and production costs.
obama also oversaw a historic widening in inequality that was an effect of the policies of the reagan-bush years, which congress blocked clinton from messing with.
The distribution of income in the United States has been more unequal under Obama’s presidency than any time since the 1930s, according to the Gini Index, a conventional measure of the inequality.
the result is that demand for a lot of the cpi goods was very low because people were so fucking poor. stores couldn't sell anything because people had no spending money; a lot of big stores went out of business.
it is true that handing out free money during the pandemic probably did influence inflation, even if the primary cause was the steep spike in oil. however, this wasn't a monetary phenomenon. it was due to an increase in demand caused by giving money to poor people, and the fact that american capital is brutally exploitative and viciously parasitic. read the grapes of wrath, especially the part where joad realizes the money he's getting in wages is just going back to the employer, who hiked the prices after the harvest, in order to eat. that's how the system works, and why it's often not the best strategy to hand out checks to the poor in the united states. it just ends up subsidizing rentiers or agrifood.