Risk. Capitalism says that investors don’t take financial risks without an upside in monetary return. Triple A bonds produce low returns based on their low risk. Junk bonds produce high yields based on their increased risk.

Investors assess risk whenever they put their funds in play in the markets. Notice, however, it’s money they risk, not their lives. Today, millions of essential workers keeping everyone else fed and well take on extraordinary risks with their lives. That’s very different.

Grocery checkers, produce loaders, pharmacists, meat cutters, crop pickers, essential factory workers, truckers and food-warehouse packers risk their health to help the rest of us.

Even more, home care providers, nurses, medical technicians, doctors, hospital custodians, hospital chefs, cooks and clerks, ambulance drivers, EMTs, and public safety responders put themselves up close to the infection risk of the COVID-19 virus.

It’s a dark side of the American social contract that those who take monetary risk, such as financiers in the investment firms on Wall Street, are safer and better protected today than those risking their lives to keep the sheltering-in-place fed and well. It’s unlikely that financiers would expose themselves to COVID-19 without significant asset benefit, if at all. COVID-19 has created a “what’s wrong with this picture” moment.

To prove this point, the Federal Reserve just allowed itself, for the first time, to buy over $2 trillion in bonds and other financial instruments originally rated investment level and now degraded to junk status because of COVID-19. That’s the Fed massively covering the bets of banks, investment firms, and corporations playing in the financial markets. But to date, that protection doesn’t apply to essential workers who keep the rest of us, including Wall Streeters, fed and well.

Don’t the rest of us, especially the wealthier among us, who are fed and kept healthy by essential individuals, have a responsibility to reduce worker risk by more than masks, PPE’s, salary, and whatever minor bonuses employers provide? Don’t many of us not on the front lines have a responsibility to put more on the table than Air Force fly-overs that honor health care workers? Something at least modestly comparable to what Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, and Wells Fargo financiers earn when they take on risk that’s merely money?

The U.S. Congress has pitched another $2 trillion, high to low in roughly this order, to the airline and travel industry, other corporations, real estate magnates, hospitals, small businesses, unemployed workers, every American adult, and every American child. Nothing goes to undocumented or worker-visa individuals who take care of the rest of us related to essential food services and home and health care delivery.

Nothing in that “stimulus” offsets the infection risk taken by essential workers every day they work in situations where adequate personal physical separation is violated, advertently or inadvertently. Are these essential workers being played for suckers?

Since the U.S. Congress and the Federal Reserve have decided to push out serious money, isn’t it time to price the life risk to essential workers? This valuing should be analogous to how the legal system calculates the worth of a lost arm or leg to bad surgery, or loss of life due to some avoidable incident.

The stress and anxiety essential workers experience should get a beginning offer of $50,000, non-taxable, for some established period of time. As an example, employees in essential jobs beginning March 15, 2020 should receive this offset, or some portion of it, for their work through August 15, or six months. If the virus continues its rage through the U.S., the dollars should be repeated for another six months.

If an essential worker gets sick from COVID-19, that employee should receive an additional $100,000. This virus is that serious. If an essential worker is hospitalized due to COVID-19, that person should receive an additional $250,000. If an essential worker dies because of COVID-19, that individual’s family should receive an additional $500,000 to help them through the crisis. This monetary award would, incidentally, offset some of the wealth gap that’s occurred between sheltering-safely individuals and front line workers.

A social contract that rewards monetary risk more highly than life risk in a pandemic isn’t worth whatever paper it’s written on. Time to even up.

Paula Noonan owns Colorado Capitol Watch, the state’s premier legislature tracking platform.