The US GDP is $19 trillion. If we just stopped everything, we would be missing $1.6t per month. Conceivably, the government could pump that much money into the

The US GDP is $19 trillion. If we just stopped everything, we would be missing $1.6t per month. Conceivably, the government could pump that much money into the economy by just writing checks to everyone so that they could pay their rent, their mortgage, and their landlord could pay their mortgage. We'd need to write checks to businesses too. And this is worst case. The economy hasn't shut down. Many of us are still employed and getting paid and I certainly am very grateful for that. But I'm not going to the pub every weekend so those people need cash. If we can treat this as hitting the pause button on the economy, and find a way to fund it during this period, then we can press the play button and carry on where we left off. Of course that would require Russia, OPEC and the US to stop pumping oil. And a billion other details. But there's a lot of us, and we don't have much else to do. This could be an economic disaster, but it doesn't need to be. Sure, another alternative is we kill all the old people and all the doctors and nurses. Apparently some people aren't worried about the old people, but surely their self interest benefits from not killing all the doctors and nurses?