This is really an illuminating moment. A lot of people have been saying that this crisis really enforces the reasoning for UBI, but that's not quite true. It's

This is really an illuminating moment. A lot of people have been saying that this crisis really enforces the reasoning for UBI, but that's not quite true. It's more accurate to say that the crisis really enforces that the government should have infrastructure in place for helicopter money, or paying arbitrary citizens cash. That's not even a controversial idea. The post office is meant to deliver mail to any American home (the value of the post office is probably much larger than any subsidy they receive (which is unfortunate in a small way, most of the post office budget problems are pension based. They can get away with it because they really are not worth failing)). The post office was also a nationwide bank for awhile. I also think that subsidizing payrolls was the better way to approach this problem. The PPP was a limited pool of money and favored businesses with the best relationship with their bankers. A simple approach of "I will pay you 25% of your annual income based on last years taxes plus inflation" is much easier. This is the bargain we've made though isn't it? The US is more OK with creative destruction. The question is how creative the destruction from covid is. How quickly do you need to liquidate a restaurant's assets to improve capital allocation? The answer to that might be "quicker than people form restaurants." Which suggests to me that just replacing service worker income is probably more efficient.