I think a New Deal style fund for infrastructure and human capital investment projects would be fantastic.
Some ideas...
Government will pay your former salary if you attend a Masters or PhD program and are succeeding there.
Delay recent bachelors grads entering the workforce by heavily subsidizing Masters degrees and PhDs in STEM. (Only others if we must, personally I think social sciences are currently acting as a destructive force in our society and are not behaving as academics but as ideological advocates.)
Massively increase STEM research and development funding.
Free technical and trade schools.
More ideas:
Subsidize universities putting their courses online for accredited degrees.
Subsidize private tutors for all subjects for K-12 kids, creating a large demand for private tutors. Require a bachelors degree that includes the subject to be tutored.
Provide funding to rebuild any manufacturing infrastructure that has been lost in the last 50 years, or just to build more. Especially designed in ways that manufacturing plants can operate safely for their workers in pandemic conditions.
Aren’t most decent Masters and PhD programs paid already?
My friends in PhD programs are paid a stipend. It’s not an industry level wage if that is what you were meaning, but they certainly don’t pay anything to be there.
Yes, I mean to make up for the opportunity cost of not working. Even if the PhD stipend is around $40-50k, that's nowhere near an industry salary that may be needed to support a family, mortgage, and so on.
Which is similar to what I think will end this recession/depression: a vaccine.
Now I would ask which path would have us coming out of this current crisis stronger: 40% of GDP spent on a “New New Deal” or 10% GDP invested in attempt to keep the status quo?
Alternatively, as we're seeing now, more and more people will ignore government orders until the election (at which point we'll see a huge change in tune from leaders), and go back to work. At some point, like in the past, people stop caring about diseases.
More and more poor people who do jobs to serve the rich will definitely have no choice but to go back to work despite the disproportionate risk they take on due to their lack of adequate health care and prevalence of preexisting conditions.
I doubt you will see the ruling class rubbing elbows with the plebs again until there is a vaccine, or at least very comprehensive therapeutics available.
The US in 2020 just invested roughly 10% of the GDP to prop up some corporations, and more or less called it a day.