Okay, fair points. Here are some of the issues I see with that. You have two options, borrow or print, right? If you borrow, you pay it back. If you print, you don't, but your citizens absorb a serious financial blow. So let's say we don't want to ruin the savings of Americans, so we borrow. Who lends? As of Dec. 2019, 74% of our debt was held by the public [0]. Odds are on that Americans fleeing to financial security would buy the better part of new debt issued, too.

So, you've kicked the can for 10 years; now it's time to pay back. Where do we get the money now? If you cancel it, you're destroying the retirements of millions of Americans, not just hurting some abstract entity of "the Market". Remember that a large number of people feel the effects of a market downturn, even if through a retirement account or pension plan.

So, to avoid retirees eating dog food, you now have to pay back. How do you propose to do this, given we already have a truly colossal $23.6 trillion in debt?

[0]: https://www.thebalance.com/who-owns-the-u-s-national-debt-33...

look you were able to find $2.4trillion for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and your economy didn't collapse. that is 10% of your total national debt. this is not going to cost that much (and even if it does it's money better spent than on those wars).

now you are asking how do you pay it back? well you could start by taxing some of the ~600 billionaires that live there. the top eight richest billionaires own as much combined wealth as "half the human race".

so it's not like there isn't a pot of money there, and taking some of it certainly is not going to cause those people hardship. now you look at some of the major corporations and they're very low tax compared to revenue and profit and you have another pot of money that you can access again without causing too much hardship on the company.

the money is out there it's just very unfairly distributed.

I completely agree. It's incredible to me how many people in this and similar threads argue that we should just give up on isolation and allow many more millions to die. This pandemic is the perfect argument for UBI and universal healthcare and yet many are still unwilling to even entertain such ideas. Human life is worth saving and we have the means.

People do indeed die as a result of economic collapse.

yes and if that was the reason people were dying now then I would say fix the economy, but that's not what is happening. the economy can be fixed when we have ensured that the people who make that economy happen are safe.

if you were at war with a foreign country, and they were killing and injuring your population, you would fight back, the economy should be shattered, but you fight the war and when you win you rebuild. that's what this is, a war. it's just the enemy is not quite the same as it has been in the past.