A landlord in a lower income housing situation might be themselves strapped for cash and rely more on that income (as opposed to this being their second investment home), so might be less forgiving of you missing your rent. And people live more paycheck to paycheck.
It's hard to remember how much uncertainty there was last spring, about how long this would last, how many would die, or just how catastrophically our economy would collapse.
I don't fault the government at all for hastily putting this together. But as others have said, that doesn't mean they shouldn't go after fraudsters now that we have some breathing room.
Full disclosure: my 2 person company received a PPP loan and it helped us for the period that it did, especially because our city government client took all of our contract's funds for COVID relief.
In that environment, what realistically was going to happen if someone didn't have money for a few weeks?
If you couldn't pay your rent - it's not like your landlord would immediately evict you. If you couldn't pay your suppliers, presumably, you wouldn't be able to place more orders - but if you were expecting a major cutback - you were probably planning to cut your orders.
What I don't get is... Everyone acts like it would've been the end of the world if we didn't stuff everyone full of money immediately.
Why would it have been?
I could see it would've been bad if 95% of people would've been able to carry on as usual, and a small number of businesses wouldn't have. They would've got evicted, put into bankruptcy, and so on.
Didn't EVERYONE have an interest in not putting EVERYONE into bankruptcy at the exact same time?