I think this is all good and needed support, but is likely, like the charitable, local and state responses to the Great Depression in the 1930's, to be overwhelmed by the scale of the economic losses. Where are the calls in Maryland to put a moratorium on foreclosures, evictions, utility shut-offs caused by loss of work, decline in hours and so forth? It probably makes sense to just put a three or four month moratorium on all these actions period, and then see where we are...
People without the resources to pay the rent, child care and so forth are looking at immediate one month needs into the $1,000-$2500 per month range - certainly that's the case for most of suburbia, if not here in Western Maryland.
So I offer two competing visions of what to do; they are not mutually exclusive. Jamelle Bouie's column is actually entitled "The Era of Small Government is Over," not as it appears here in the link
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/18/opinion/coronavirus-bailouts-stimulus.html and point the nation to the path of FDR and LBJ in terms of the scope of the actions - and individual payment needed.
Those of us who fought for the Green New Deal, and are still fighting for it, understand, as does even CNN's economic commentator Richard Quest, he of the brutal British pronunciation, that even a trillion dollar stimulus will be inadequate: he's talking up to three trillion in the initial packages. That's Sanders' Green New Deal scale folks - and who is asking "can we afford it" "what about the debt and deficit"?
It's like religion in the foxhole: when we're heading into a Depression and an assault by germs on our entire way of life, "we're all Modern Monetary Theory" believers...even if the Garrett County Democrats are so frightened of the idea that they won’t even discuss it in public...treat it like it was a Medieval religious "heresy." Sorry: it's about 80-90% right.
Contrast this to the views of a Clinton honcho from the "Era of Big Government is Over Days." That's Reed Hundt, and the title of his piece in the NY Times is "This is the stimulus we need right now, not $1,000 for every person..." I don't disagree with his emphasis on our medical crisis needs, material and personnel: that does have to be addressed immediately, but he, not surprisingly, seems clueless on the depth of the economic pain already, as the state unemployment numbers that Trump wants suppressed show. He wants to delay an average citizen based $$ response until the need is clearer; well, it's clear right now to enough of us who devote time to looking at those aspects of the economy, and its clear to the investors who are driving the sell-offs in the markets. Huge chunks of our economy have been shut down, for good medical reasons, but the impacts and results on our collective economic well-being are no different than in 1929-1932.
Failing to stem the avalanche early enough sets off chain reactions that will carry us beyond a steep "V" - sharp and short - recession to something much longer, a broad "U" with the "D" word a reality.
There are millions of us, tens of millions of us, however, Sanders and Warren supporters who aren't going to accept this sitting in rocking chairs.
We all need more "solidarity" and "mutual caring" in this most ruthlessly capitalistic society in the more than two hundred years that we have lived under its "ideals."
But those words operate at several levels at least: the intimate, personal of family, and outwards to circles of friends, local and beyond.
What's missing is those ideals carried into new institutions and mechanisms outlined in the Green New Deal, towards our collective actions in the economy and their impact on Nature.
This medical crisis is a full scale dress rehearsal for the type of value re-orientation we will need on an even broader scale. For the moment, Nature doesn't even count.