The Epidemiologist And Thief

Michael Osterholm of U. Minnesota's Center for Infectious Disease Research And Policy (CIDRAP), and the Minnesota Federal Reserve Bank President Neel Kashkari came out in an editorial in favor of a renewed and stricter set of lockdowns to address the spread of COVID-19:

To successfully drive down our case rate to less than one per 100,000 people per day, we should mandate sheltering in place for everyone but the truly essential workers. By that, we mean people must stay at home and leave only for essential reasons: food shopping and visits to doctors and pharmacies while wearing masks and washing hands frequently. According to the Economic Policy Institute, 39 percent of workers in the United States are in essential categories. The problem with the March-to-May lockdown was that it was not uniformly stringent across the country. For example, Minnesota deemed 78 percent of its workers essential. To be effective, the lockdown has to be as comprehensive and strict as possible.

But how to pay for this? Isn't keeping people alive during this new lockdown going to be terribly expensive? They have an answer for this (emboldening mine):

This pandemic is deeply unfair. Millions of low-wage, front-line service workers have lost their jobs or been put in harm’s way, while most higher-wage, white-collar workers have been spared. But it is even more unfair than that; those of us who’ve kept our jobs are actually saving more money because we aren’t going out to restaurants or movies, or on vacations. Unlike in prior recessions, remarkably, the personal savings rate has soared to 20 percent from around 8 percent in January.

Because we are saving more, we have the resources to support those who have been laid off. Typically when the government runs deficits, it must rely on foreign investors to buy the debt because Americans aren’t generating enough savings to fund it. But we can finance the added deficits for Covid-19 relief from our own domestic savings. Those savings end up funding investment in the economy. That’s why traditional concerns about racking up too much government debt do not apply in this situation. It is much safer for a country to fund its deficits domestically than from abroad.

Such savings are not the government's to spend, though, unless

1. the government confiscates such savings, or
2. taxes them at a very high rate.

Joe Biden has lately said he would institute such a lockdown if scientists recommended it ("I would listen to the scientists"). This has already happened. Given the printing press approach to buffering the population from the consequences of COVID-19, it's unlikely the fiscal oppression approach will get traction, but it's far from guaranteed.