I am voluntarily (10% family-preservation, 90% community service) staying in my house. I’m now “hoarding” (to use your hyperbolic term) all the money that would normally go to fuel, eating out, and entertainment.
The restaurant, movie theater, and gas station owner would, circumstances permitting, surely prefer to be able to serve me and I likewise.
Why don’t I just mail checks to people that I’d normally buy from? Because I don’t know what my own economic future looks like. Will I have a job in 6 months? What will my retirement savings look like then? Plus, I can’t just send the money where it would have gone and also send it to the people who are now selling me more at-home food or new goods/services that I need to be productive at home.
I’m fortunate to work as a W-2 office worker/spreadsheet miner, at least for now. If I were a bar, movie theater, or auto repair shop owner or worker, I’d be in a lot worse shape.
This is not a Bezos, Gates, Musk driven problem. This is driven by the inability of the consumer to consume normally.
As a moral issue, we are choosing to continue to pay our every-other-week house cleaner to not clean our house. Everyone else is getting paid iff they provide current goods/services. We have our own financial survival to look out for until more is clear about the economic outlook.
The economy is a circular river system. If it stops one day, there is going to be areas of drought in places, as well as huge reservoirs protected by dams. Money does not disappear, it only moves. You lose money on stocks, someone else on the other side of the world made money with their short position.
Perhaps that dollar is held up in some whale's cash account after they closed their positions. You would tax that whale for that cash, and redistribute it to the working class to afford food and shelter.
In any recession, the big stall is capital being too skiddish to pay for labor, resulting in lowered consumer spending, justifying less demand for labor, and creating a worsened financial crisis due to even lower consumer spending levels. If you are able to keep the working class afloat, you can conceivably keep consumer spending afloat, and therefore keep the economy afloat, even if capital is fearful.
The economy is the collective action of people producing the goods and services that you and I consume - food, haircuts, medicine, video games. Money is a claim on some portion of that stuff that has been or will be produced. Redistributing money is not going to suddenly make us productive again when most people are only leaving their house once a week to stock up on groceries.
Example: I go to a clothing store and give them an amount of money that I value less than the clothes they give me in exchange. We are both better off because we have made that mutually-beneficial exchange. If the exchange doesn't happen because the store is closed, then there is no revenue (let alone profit) to divvy up.
The only way to simulate that transaction in a way that gives money to employees is to literally take it from customers who receive nothing in return.
My solution would be to tax you redistribute that money from your pocket to the people who need food and shelter, the same people who stimulate consumer spending, because you are unable to currently do that yourself due to shelter in place orders and/or perceptions of the state of the economy.
What you are describing is essentially how to ration the dwindling supplies of goods during the epidemic.
Enacting arbitrary taxes where the government simply appropriates funds from entities that have it and gives it to those who don’t is unfair, dangerous, and will undermine trust in the rule of law. It will be ripe for abuse and predatory behavior. It is also a system that loses the critical information market mechanisms provide, instead replacing with “command” based allocation which is a dangerous precedent.
The way to achieve what you propose that is not at odds with civil society is for the government to “print” new money, and distribute it through moderately means based criteria.
The US has unlimited capacity to increase its money base as a sovereign entity. Normally this is done through the Fed buying bonds from the treasury. The treasury has the authority to create money directly if they choose.
This has the effect of devaluing the currency as a whole. By distributing the new currency ti citizens that need it, it is effectively a transfer of wealth that is distributed throughout the economy in a decentralized and proportional way.
It is only necessary to target those who need help, opposed to harder problem created when the need to target who can “afford” to sacrifice their savings is added.
This doesn’t address the problem of productivity lost, but it allows what productive output there is to be more fairly rationed.
It also less subject to being the legal and political nightmare your suggestion entails.
There are two sides of our society; production and consumption. If we aren't producing, how are we continuing to consume?
Instead of going to a restaurant, I make a sandwich, instead of buying a new shirt, etc. GDP has indeed dropped, and some people have no cash flow (fixable), but I'm not seeing physical (excluding the abstraction of the banking system) reasons why this can't be sustained for months if necessary.
Thinking abstractly, why not? If the businesses are open, the money is there to pay everyone. If you send everyone in the economy home, where has that money that would have been used for salary gone?
Someone is holding it rather than distributing it, that's the only reason. So, take a look at who is hoarding money like a dragon sleeping on a pile of gold, tax it, and pay everyone else enough for a roof and food.