Now that the US Government has issued as much monetary stimulus as it can, I had thought about an alternative to outright distribution of money in order to prevent unequitable distributions of wealth.
Monetary stimulus where direct "forgiving" of taxes owed as a way to stimulate the economy is not economically unsound, but perhaps costs too much even for the government to decide what to do with the money.
Fiscal Stimulus is much hard to instigate b/c rather than distributing cash in a manner and a level that is guaranteed to be absorbed into the economy quickly, we can "forgive" tax bills, specifically IRS penalties for early withdrawals. I think if there was ever a time to look into a justifiable reason to forgive IRS early withdrawal penalties temporarily so that those just a few years to retirement, or those who have recently lost jobs that they were looking forward to would be a good thing.
It's unlikely to be billions of dollars, but knowing it retroactively so that there are no free-riders in the process means waiting till "after the fact" to "forgive the tax bill." If we were to announce it a year ahead, it is likely to be abused. Retroactively, we can be confident that the market worked correctly.
Other forms of fiscal stimulus that can be extended to the public without sacrificing state and local revenue include retroactive taxation forgiveness on certain securities. In the case of a taxable GO bond, as incentive to purchase a certain local municipalities bonds, the Federal government when it sees a liquidity problem being created can retroactively change the taxation status of a bond if that municipality requires those securities to be sold to maintain their operations.
To summarize, I believe it might be in our legislative and economic interest to offer penalty free Retirement Plan widrawals, and I was introducing the idea retroactive tax-free status changes as a way to prevent municipal bond auction failures.