That would both put a massive strain on the Social Security trust and not pressure employers at all, since they'd likely be happy to have the most expensive employees retire early.
It’s absolutely a bailout.
Repo's are overnight borrowing collateralized by the US Treasuries. Basically it is borrowing to maintain capitalization requirements in these high volatility times. From the perspective of the US government they have literally 0 risk (you are guaranteed to get back either USD denominated money or US treasury).
You should compare it to a payday loan that is collateralized [1]. And then where the collateral happens to be insufficient because a glut of that item just came on the market (analogous to the sudden rush of banks needing to convert their Treasurys to cash).
For the ordinary person, "Sorry, can't help you, you just have to deal with the fact that everyone else is selling that product too and so it doesn't provide the value you want and you have to take a big loss or an interest rate corresponding to higher risk."
For banks, "Omg! You can't sell your bonds at par because everyone else is trying to sell before maturity? You poor thing, let me buy them up for you with new money!"
[1] Sometimes referred to as "title loans", as you might e.g. put up your (remaining equity in your) car as the collateral.
If the Fed wants to keep the 30-day interest rate down, they can just buy the bonds directly themselves. They don't need to wait for the banks to buy the bonds and then repo them.
And guess what, medical bills are the number one cause of bankruptcy in the US, insurance companies are refusing to guarantee coverage for Coronavirus treatment, and the Trump administration just blocked states expanding Medicaid to do the same.
Might need to think about systemic risk a little differently.
(There are a lot of different ways to look at the effect of that money injection, but this is one way to try to simplify it into a cost measure that doesn't require thinking about the effects on the economy)
That's the really disturbing thing... the bond market hasn't been liquid this week! Lots of no-bid.
The real problem is that if they did this it wouldn't actually have any real short-term effect other than making the things seniors want to buy more expensive. Money's a fiction: it's purpose is to incentivize people to produce things that other people want. If you increase the amount of money in a population but don't increase the supply of goods, it just means everything gets more expensive. You still have the same amount of hospital beds, senior living centers, cruise berths, golf courses, etc. to go around but now the market-clearing price of buying one goes up, some fraction of poor old people end up without one, and their spot is taken by a richer young person.
Over the long-term there's a reallocation of labor that actually does change things: that senior might retire and his job will be filled by someone younger, or people who might've gone into pediatric nursing instead work at a nursing home, or luxury condos might be converted into assisted living. All of these have unintended consequences that ripple down to others, eg. if condos are converted to senior homes it raises the price of housing for young people.
The government doesn’t do this though. That’s why there is confidence in the USD.
It's just that Congress has delegated this to multiple independent organizations within the government. The U.S. Mint makes physical coins and paper money. The U.S. Treasury issues government debt. The IRS collects taxes. The Secret Service prosecutes counterfeiting. The Federal Reserve serves as the lender of last resort to the banking system. The President submits the budget, which must be approved by Congress.
The division between the President, Congress, U.S. Treasury, and Federal Reserve forms a very important check on the tendency of most governments to just print money to cover government services, since different branches of government are responsible for determining how much is spent; where it's spent; where it's collected from, and under what terms it'll be repaid; and how much it's worth. But it's worth remembering that constitutionally, Congress has the power to create all of those agencies, and Congress also has the power to unmake them. I don't necessarily think that doing so is a good idea, but it's possible.
This is exactly what they're doing every time they drop rates - handing out new money to the financial industry. The main thing one can be confident in regarding The Fed is that they will create enough new money to keep the numbers at the Wall Street Casino ("The Ecomony") going up up up, even attempting to do so when it's blatantly inappropriate. It's seemingly the only button they know how to push.
The belief in USD comes from military dominance, the petrodollar, momentum, and a lack of better immediate options. Nobody was ever fired for buying IBM either, but eventually the world will move on.
We create money all in extreme amounts all the time. Money is not some sort of 'ore' which we have to mine out of the planet through hard labor. It's a resource we create at will by simple agreement and at the push of a button in unlimited quantities. The 'downside' is that 'new' money potentially can devalue existing money, as there is just more to go around.
Giving the massive amounts of money we create daily to those that need it, for instance to retire after a reasonable lifetime of work, in some twisted logic feels 'bad', where lavishing it on those that do not need it, so they can use it just to hoard, speculate, or buy back their own stock, seems to be accepted as 'fine'.
You can be critical of QE, monetary policy, and the general priorities of the government but it doesn't make OP's point a helpful one. Especially considering the lack of centralized control, let alone the various other major differences between it and entitlement spending.