The problem is that we have stopped making stuff.
Once the warehouses all empty, there will be no more products. All those nice things you are used to buying to make your life nice and safe and clean and fun will be gone.
The infrastructure to even make the stuff will decay and be gone.
Printing money doesn't make products. It doesn't repair factories. It doesn't prevent the coming collapse of the prosperity we have enjoyed these last 100 years.
This is why it's essential that relief go to directly to people, and that we free those people up enough from expenses that aren't directly economically productive (things like rent, say) as we can. We want people to have money to spend, so producers will have a reason to go on making things to sell them.
It produces immediate demand at the cost of reduced future investment -- which could potentially keep suppliers afloat temporarily in a crisis.
But while the problem today is a demand problem, we are really only days-to-weeks away from a supply catastrophe unlike anything seen in two centuries or more.
Basically, no new stuff is being made anywhere right now -- because it is illegal to do so most places -- we are all locked in our houses on threat of arrest (or worse in some countries)
Right now, the local warehouses are still full, so the stores get restocked. Those warehouses will get restocked from regional ones.
But, we are draining all of the buffers in all of the supply chains of all of the products. Once it all drains, there is no more supply.
Climate Change says tick tock tick tock
Rest assured your pop culture of choice is just as odious to someone as Honey Boo Boo is to you.
We need a few people to actually do work, but it's hard to figure out how to make that happen in a way that is fair.
lots of people are tweeting that they are 3-4 weeks from disaster. that's some very special definintion of prosperity. These are numbers that come to mind when you think about middle age peasant.