Setting up the bureaucracy to manage indirect funding would take significantly more time than we have.

People are losing their jobs as we speak, and weeks-long quarantines are happening right now too. I have a couple of friends who have literally no idea how they’re going to stay housed and fed.

If I'm a person who doesn't actually need this to pay my rent, then I'm just going to use the rent voucher and take the cash I was going to use to pay my rent and stash that instead.

Why do you care if some people just save it instead of spending on the necessities?

What about people for whom this is pretty close to their rent/food/entertainment budget anyway? You want them to sit in their houses staring at each other with no way to pay their bills for [insert streaming entertainment service here]?

Well, it's not the government that vends those things. So that's much much harder to administrate than stuffing and mailing millions of plain old paper checks, or even dealing with direct deposit. (Granted that checks have their own problems -- thousands of people don't have banks.)

It's probably just simpler to administer if it's just universal vs having layers of red tape to manage and police it.

You're never going to get 100% of it put back in the economy immediately, but I think a very large percentage of it will.

Oh boy - folks am not advocating this :). I was asking a genuine question as a response to the comment that's all. Thanks for the replies.