The piper will eventually be paid.

A very interesting analysis.  From Three World Wars: Fiscal-Monetary Consequences by George J. Hall and Thomas J. Sargent.  From the introduction:

This paper describes how the US government made “the public pay for” surges in expenditures associated with three world wars. We apply an approach of Becker (1962) by focusing exclusively on a consolidated government budget constraint and ignoring other parts of macroeconomic models.  Unlike Bassetto (2002), Davig et al. (2011), Leeper et al. (2013), Bi et al. (2013), Leeper et al. (2021), Sargent and Wallace (1981, 1985), and other users of “fiscal theories of price levels”, we assume nothing about demand functions for base money and government bonds or about Central Bank and Treasury decision rules. Instead, emulating Friedman (1952) and Hall and Sargent (2021), we assemble time series of Treasury accounts and Federal Reserve balance sheets, and, in light of consolidated federal government budget constraints, watch for patterns, especially during and after big wars.2 We focus on similarities and differences between the US government’s “War on COVID-19” and two twentieth century world wars. The US “War on COVID-19” shares these features with those two world wars:

• Negative labor supply shocks, i.e., converting civilian workers to soldiers during the twentieth century world wars, and lockdown mandates that diverted workers into unemployment and voluntary withdrawals from the labor force during the COVID-19 pandemic

• Extensive government restrictions on domestic and international travel and trade

• Surges in federal government expenditures mostly financed by issuing interest-bearing debt and base money

• Federal Reserve support of federal bond prices and an expanded Fed balance sheet

In their concluding remarks, they observe:

The words of Keynes with which we began this paper remind us that someone will ultimately pay for the US War on COVID-19. Table 2 measures how the US government made “the public pay for” war-time surges in expenditures in the ways that Keynes (1923, p. 62) delineated – taxes, sales of government bonds, and printing money. As percentages of total revenues, sources were: 

It is striking how little of the War on COVID-19 has thus far been financed by explicit taxation, even compared to World Wars I and II.18 Harry Truman’s advice about how to pay for a war has temporarily been ignored.

Indeed.  Such a profligate waste of money which had so little a beneficial impact and at so low a current cost.  And which will be paid for later by everyone, including those most unable to pay.  The piper will eventually be paid.