This is sound analysis, except, perhaps for the part about needing the “stimulus” bill to be a stimulus bill. When the smoke clears from the shut-down of business, a massive New Deal style bill, including funding for healthcare initiatives, may well be in order. But not now, what we need is income maintenance, as Umair suggests.

The acid test will be what Congress does next month. Some parts of the CARES bill provide significant unemployment benefits on an ongoing basis, and some of the “loans” are really conditional subsidies, as they will be forgiven if spent to maintain payrolls.That’s really a way to maintain incomes without eviscerating balance sheets. (Any loans that are expected to be paid back and any equity interest the government acquires in exchange for allowing companies to pay their workers would be counterproductive.) When these loans run out, though, the government will have to rinse and repeat.

Will the government respond to this crisis like it’s 1934 or like it’s 1937? In 1934, the New Deal printed money to stimulate the economy. In 1937, the government stopped printing money because it thought it was out of money, and the recovery tanked. Too many people believe that we cannot afford the trillions of dollars the government is printing, that somehow, all these people stuck at home will overwhelm the marketplace and drive down the value of the dollar. Or they think that money owed to the central bank is actually “debt,” when in fact it is just what the left pocket owes the right pocket.

FWIW, I think Trump — whom I loathe — will be on the right side of this battle. He will want to spend unlimited amounts, if only to get himself re-elected for the largesse. As it turns out, an unlimited amount is what we have available, and an unlimited amount is what it’s going to take. Whether Congress can get there remains to be seen.