This is the low effort response every time. Where is the nuance in the thinking around magnitude and implementation of policy?

It's not a black/white situation of choosing between economic collapse or hyperinflation at all. And keep in mind there were 3-4 huge packages passed. It's not like this had to be done as a single rushed magnum opus bill, this is the consequence of many bills and executive actions passed over 2 years, coinciding with a Fed that had unilateral power to ease the brakes yet did nothing for 2 years.

Well I mean our political climate is why it had to be passed in a huge bill. When every bill of any importance is passed with narrow margins and political capital is finite you’re incentivized to have “big pushes” because you likely wont get another shot.

> you likely wont get another shot

I'm not really that familiar with legislative processes, but this seems ridiculous if it's true. Isn't it the job of the house to write bills? What else do they have to do? Why won't they get another shot?

I think it's just a lack of political will. Not from regular people, but from politicians. People love to point to a huge 1000+ page bill that didn't pass because the guys voted it down and say "oh well we can't have X because the other guys voted against it". If "your guys" are really interested in having X, why don't they just write another bill that contains the minimum language to enact it?

We should really reject these massive "omnibus" bills out of principle. No one even reads them! There's no reason we can't have simple, targeted legislation that is limited to exactly one topic.

Regardless of my opinion on Covid bailouts (too big, too small, too many, too few) all such interventions are squeezing a balloon: you shift the problem temporally.

There’s nothing wrong with doing that (people sensibly borrow to purchase and use assets all the time). And when people are in the middle of a crisis it’s appropriate to take action (even in a drought the fire brigade sprays water on a fire).

But it’s worth looking retrospectively to figure out how much to do next time, not to be absolutist about it one way or the other.

This is the correct answer.

Perhaps its because I work on the backend side of businesses (specifically the tax part) and so I actually get to see the financial numbers, but I am aware of over ten thousand jobs in SoCal alone that were saved by the PPP bailout.

It's disturbing to see the vaguely sociopath comments on this thread by tech workers who were largely unaffected by COVID complaining about "interfering" with the markets and about "bailouts."

A lot of businesses were hit hard by COVID. For tens of thousands of businesses, the COVID PPP loans were the only source of revenue they had at a time when government restrictions (i.e., the lockdowns) were inhibiting their sources of revenue. (And guys, we were in a pandemic that killed millions worldwide. Even after the lockdowns ended, many people were scared to go out for months.)

And even with the PPP loans, many small businesses didn't survive the lockdowns. Margins are low in many industries. Not everything is tech where you can bumble along without profits or purpose for a decade surviving on fat VC money.

Sure, but it didn’t have to be the most wasteful implementation possible.

thank you for taking the time to add this -- in the first six months of covid-19, there were some US gov'ies that took the small business story very seriously, and conducted direct, public surveys and published those numbers. The trends now, two years later, are still hidden from even intelligent people here at YNews, since the mainstream news won't print stories that refer to it, for fear of causing panics(?); and that ridiculous, cynical number called unemployment just floats along in the news every day.

I have done some initial quantitative analysis on the raw survey responses, but not gone further, since you know, daily troubles. The small business situation is deeply changed in the last two years, and this is not over at all.