One way to get money out there in a hurry would be to send $1000 to everyone getting Social Security along with their next payment. As an 81 year old I can see the extra problems. I may need to pay to get food and medicine delivered while sheltering in place rather than walking to the store or clinic. I have a small extra income from renting some rooms. One renter is a nurse, and what if she gets sick and can’t pay the rent? Another has a job but might have delayed pay checks while working from home. Working from home the utility bills I pay for their dwelling will be higher. Just a few, probably more that I will experience soon.
Years ago when I once collected unemployment it took almost a month to get it in place. Also, if one is sheltering in place or quarantined how do you get to the unemployment office?
One useful measure would be to move IRS deadline from April 15 to a later date. My local government has just given a 90 day extension for filing business taxes. They forgot to give a 90 day extension to people filing a personal income tax which includes questions about business income. I and many others will have problems paying IRS if our renters/customers are not paying us.
A good proposal that therefore would not be considered, was to use the unemployment system.
If a worker was sent home by a company for coronavirus, the company would file a claim with the unemployment office; they would continue to pay employees. The unemployment office would then re-imburse the company, and eventually the feds would distribute funds to all the unemployment offices to cover it.
The idea was that there was a system already in place that could be used. The companies know the workers, know why they are not working, know their pay, and they know about the unemployment offices because the companies are making contributions to the unemployment offices.
We shouldn’t be sending money to everybody, if there is ONE thing we can do, it is to simply make sure that everybody gets paid if they are sidelined because they got this flu, or because the government shut down their employer (a taking). If people knew they still had their checks, they would then still spend money, which would keep things moving some, and they could do volunteer work, or fix up their houses, they would be less likely to be super-stressed about everything.
My daughter became so much less depressed when she found out she was going to get a paycheck when they closed down the schools.