During the pandemic, there is more need for safety net than stimulus. While businesses are being asked to close, or limit capacity, stimulus isn't what's needed. Safety net is what's needed to keep people in their homes and to maintain people's health insurance.
We also need to keep various public servants on the job, such as police officers. Those who wish to defund the police do have a good point about prioritizing other social services, however.
For a lot of renters, who are facing mounting debt, there needs to be things like a rent debt jubilee. This can be funded by the government using printed money from the Federal Reserve. Otherwise a rent jubilee bankrupts a lot of landlords including mom and pops.
We are now entering an era where governments and central banks, such as the Federal Reserve, are serving more as backstops to the economy. They are paying for mounting costs, such as the Medicare needs of our aging population.
Here is a link to an interesting article from The Economist. It's about the increasing role of printed money and the need to manage it wisely. Printed money can also create a great moral hazard, distortion, inflation and corruption if managed poorly.
I think Republicans tend to manage the money, as well as government, more poorly.
For the most part, we don't need stimulus in the middle of a pandemic, but we do need safety net.
As for stimulus, there are some things that we do need tho. Things like research on better treatments, testing and vaccines.
I also think that scientific research, in general, is good. Even something like astronomy can keep great minds engaged and create jobs. It tends to be a safe, social distancing, activity versus something like, for instance, a football game or a casino. Observatories with telescopes aren't usually that crowded.
In the long run, we will need funding to tackle our other big challenge; global warming. We need to keep building green infrastructure.
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