JR, you're a very smart dude, but I think you are underestimating economic impact. A bunch of those trillions recently evaporated in the stock market were held by people over 60 years old. To a lot of those people, those funds made social security and Medicare nice perks, but unnecessary for retirement. Those people are the ones that buy retirement homes in Florida, take bunches of vacations, go on cruises, eat out, etc. In other words, they throw around a ton of discretionary income that drives home building, retail, retail construction, and the vacation and tourism industries. They are the ones that give their children and grandchildren money for college or help with that down payment on a house or a car. With their nest egg 30-40% gone they will become very conservative financially and the market will take 8-10 years to be back at 29,000 (just have to trust me on that based on looking at every similar scale maket collapse in the last 100 years).

Then you have the fact by the end of April we could possibly have the highest unemployment rate recorded in U.S. history and a GDP similar to what we had when we had 100 million less people in this country. That totally kills car sales, home builders and any industry that lives off discretionary spending. That means airlines, hotels, restaurants, and retail.

So now we,have a government that has to try and increase social security payments to the biggest senior class in history while having substantially fewer worker paying into the system. That was already an issue at full employment, but the numbers get really bad with double digit unemployment sustained for any period of time. That 2030 SS problem becomes a 2021 problem and you're looking at deficits of $3-4 trillion annually instead of $1 trillion.

Then you have the impending collapse, again, of the banking industry. People see what happened to Grandpa in the pandemic of 2020 and avoid the markets, which pushes bond yields up, stressing already troubled companies with increased interest cost and states and municipalities dealing with high unemployment costs. The retail banks are looking at record home and car loan default rates in this scenario and people are going to be maxing credit cards to get by, only to default on them later. So here comes TARP II that could cost another trillion to an already taxed federal government.

When I balance that out against a virus that could infect 50,000,000 Americans and kill 1 to 1.5 million before we build an immunity level, I'm not very sure we are doing the right thing from a long term perspective.