Yes. It is. It's frighteningly high, but likely necessary: We have a massive crisis. It seems like the least of all evils, unless we somehow are able to act wit

Yes. It is. It's frighteningly high, but likely necessary: We have a massive crisis. It seems like the least of all evils, unless we somehow are able to act with focused intelligence. On the one hand: Look at unemployment rates, business failure rates, mortgage defaults, people unable to pay for food/medicine/shelter, or any other economic metrics, and plot even conservative predictions even a month or two out. The economy will be dead very quickly if we don't do something drastic. On the other hand: If we let it burn: look at COVID19 mortality rates, and multiply by a significant fraction of the US population. You land on numbers greater than WWI casualties, and likely greater than all previous wars combined. Heck, looking at permanent lung damage alone, we're already tanking our economy. These are exceptional times. They take exceptional measures. The metrics I care about are: (1) Structural damage to the economy (layoffs, defaults, bankruptcies, etc.). (2) The number of people working (likely in pandemic-adapted industries) (3) Deaths. To minimize those, we'll either need to be clever or to inflate. So far, we've been really bad at clever.