With a true safety net a 20% contraction doesn't cause loss of life. Choosing to let this push people out on the street or into otherwise dire straits is a government's choice, not an inevitability. If companies fold and people can switch seamlessly from position to safety net to new position, allegedly the market will normalize and reallocate resources efficiently. You can't reallocate without freeing resources!

A contraction of 20% only puts us nominally back less than a decade. People didn't have to be sacrificed back then, and they don't today.

There are interventions we do need, but if everyone took a 20% hit as a group instead of a de facto Hunger Games, it wouldn't be nearly as ghastly.