I have a number of friends in the contracting/remodeling/construction industry. Demand for their services skyrocketed during COVID while they were all simultaneously working with their accountants to maximize their take from the COVID PPP program.
Huge quantities of COVID money were pumped into companies that absolutely did not need it, and that's not even counting the massive volume of fraudulent claims. The COVID Paycheck Protection Program was supposed to shore up companies that would otherwise have to fire employees, but AFAICT nothing really stopped highly profitable companies from also collecting the money.
And this was by design. The administration at the the time explicilty pushed for there to be no oversight at all on this. The opposition party at the time said it's just setting things up for fraud and corruption, but it was desired to have no oversight. Not even after the funds had been released (if you wanted to make an argument that upfront oversight would have slowed down the distribution).
The administration both fired the inspectors general that would oversee the program, and passed laws to prevent transparency into the program. It was fairly controversial at the time, but now mostly lost in the haze of 2020 lockdowns.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/06/15/inspector...
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2020/06/16/taxpayers-...
Still give it out right away. Just put a checkbox on the form. And then follow up with the details on forgiveness later.
If a company jumps the gun, they think things look black, but in a month it turns around and they are fine allow them to return it or keep it at a low (but not crazy low) interest rate.
For foreignness prove the loss/necessity.
So can go after egregious abusers. Because it wasn't abuse if you took it and didn't need it. So long as used for payroll, rent, etc. Because why wouldn't you take free money. We did.
I have 0 or negative AGI while sometimes having gross income/earnings/gains in the millions I got auto-sent several stimulus checks of the max size, because Congress wrote it based on having an “AGI of $75000 and lower” or similar number. AGI is after most tax deductions
Back to the by design part, the primary goal was to keep velocity in the economy high, and that means getting it to people with a high spend
Fairness is not a factor at all
Our economy works from velocity not whether one has money. Hoarding is worse than spending, not saying that poorer people would hoard just how its not a factor. It was designed to make maximum spending
Someone prewrote it for congress they knew what they were doing while congress was just scared
Since when is revenue and profit dictated by anyone's sense of fairness? That's an awfully moralistic and judgemental take on everyone else's needs and desires.
Sadly this blend of judgemental view of everyone's money already hit small things like buying groceries. Damn the have-nots for generating inflation by actually stocking on the decent food that the well-to-do used to buy.
Do you see any problem in anyone spending their own money in any way they'd like?
These were supposed to keep at-risk companies from failing when the economy crashed, but then the economy didn't crash and instead it was just a huge government handout of free money to most companies.
"We want to prevent the economy from crashing hard and long" is how I'd phrase motivations. Certain sectors did crash immediately, and yet the overall blast radius wasn't very large and a lot of stuff bounced back immediately.
That seems like a great success.
Loans being forgiven to generously even for companies that did NOT see a sustained dip in demand, on the other hand, is a more targeted specific problem, and a lesson to learn. But if you learn too broad a lesson like "stimulus is dumb" then you just drive yourself back off a difference cliff next time something exceptional happens.
This is naive and ignores the real sequence of events.
Things like conferences were getting canceled before the first official government actions in the US. Groceries were being hoarded. People were paying attention to events. The government sticking its head in the sand or just repeating "everything is fine, stay calm" messages wouldn't have prevented any impact.
Uncertainty is an economic killer. And if you remember early on, that uncertainty also led to a lot less controversy over the canceled events and restrictions than arose later. (Though in retrospect, even many "paranoid" estimates back then were far less than a million US deaths...)
Some level of stimulus was almost certain to be necessary regardless of official Covid actions in March 2020 unless you wanted to just let those companies and workers drown as people chose to change their behavior.
(The "restrictions should've been loosened earlier" argument is a much more reasonable one, but IMO still ignores how much of this was already local by winter of 2020, and also that at that point the initial economic damage was done.)
(That's before getting into the recklessness of assuming future severe novel diseases won't be even more deadly on limited early data...)
These people who bought homes and shit with ppp are going to go to prison. I hope at least.
> Do you see any problem in anyone spending their own money in any way they'd like?
"How dare you tell the bank robber to return the money he stole. Who are you to tell him how to spend his own money? That's awfully moralistic and judgmental of you."
College students who weren't planning to have any income anyway before Covid hit. And that's at least still a relatively "legitimate" payout compared to the screw-ups like sending money to prisoners [0].
But really both cases are massively massively dwarfed by anyone who could fog a mirror starting an LLC and getting $40k to $250k of PPP money. I personally know a couple people who should go to jail for this (but probably won't even have to repay the money, let alone repay with interest, let alone get in trouble).
[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2022/04/05/gover...
Inappropriate QE >> PPP Grants >> Stimulus Check for undeserving person
Stimulus Check for undeserving person >> PPP Grants >> Inappropriate QE
PPP was a fraudster's paradise, though. The idea was good, the implementation was not so good.
Where exactly do you see a problem with that? To put it differently, do you feel it's better to arbitrarily discriminate against elements of your society with a program intended to actually help everyone everywhere?
More importantly, what leads you to believe that the goal of the COVID stimulus was to help individuals instead of society as a whole? Think about it for a second. In a moment in time where circumstances were leading to an unprecedented economic crunch, wouldn't a bottom-up consumer side stimulus help economy stay afloat?
But, as I said, my bigger issue is the massive PPP fraud. And my issue with massive fraud on the scale of hundreds of billions of dollars is that the US is already deeply in debt.
And my issue with the nation being deeply in debt is that future generations will have to pay for the profligate spending of this one, which I find immoral.
it should have been a program to minimize the shock to the economy.
it should never have been a program to help everyone everywhere, because this type of program triggers inflation and is often followed by recession.
I have multiple friends in tech who switched to remote and literally used the extra stimulus cash to trade with Robinhood and crypto.
I doubt this is representative. But people making $100k who ended up saving money from no longer needing to commute did not need thousands of dollars in stimulus. Of course, it was neat getting the money, but it resulted in a lot of extra cash.
Comically, I also have friends who just paid down debt and didn’t buy anything.
But my anecdotes are lucky in that I didn’t know anyone who lost their job or got seriously ill.
It was not sold as a stimulus, it was to allow businesss to pay furloughed employees (in a bizarre ill-thought-out privately-run unemployment insurance scheme) to continue to pay ongoing expenses.
What didn't make sense, of course, is what those people were supposed to be buying, since the reason they were furloughed was because.... people weren't buying things, because of lockdowns and such. Hence, inflation when aggregate $ exceeded stuff worth buying.
> It was not sold as a stimulus, it was to allow businesss to pay furloughed employees (in a bizarre ill-thought-out privately-run unemployment insurance scheme) to continue to pay ongoing expenses.
Can you clarify what's your rationale for believing that a program designed to "allow businesss to pay furloughed employees (...) to continue to pay ongoing expenses" does not correspond to an economic stimulus program?
Source: I was furloughed April 2020 while my employer at the time received over $2m in PPP. Furloughed employees were explicitly told to collect UI.
Yet, at the same time, they were forcing parts of the economy to shut down. Nothing like hitting the gas and the brake at the same time.
I think the criticism is that the stimulus worked too well and we’re suffering inflation and whatnot now.
Someone who did want the money (enough that they were willing to sell some GME stock to get to) got the money instead.
And now the person who didn’t need the money hasn’t got any money.
Justice served?
And what's wrong with that? Aren't we talking about an economic stimulus program? What do you think is the whole point of an economic stimulus program, other than stimulating the economy?
1) there could have been more money for people who actually needed it and were negatively impacted by losing their job or getting sick or whatnot
2) buying lots of “luxury” items drove up inflation. This is bad for a whole slew of reasons we are seeing now.
If we wanted to stimulate the economy, we could have done it in more effective ways that didn’t hose us.
How so? buying stuff cures inflation. Are you referring to supply chain shortages making non-luxury stuff not get produced?
But we could have put rules in place that were enforced retroactively. Something like “you get $600 if you lost your job. Everyone who asks gets it. But when you file your taxes if you didn’t lose your job and you took the money, you have to pay it back.” Stuff like that.
I worked for a consulting company that had a pretty smart expense approval process. They approved everything and audited you severely when you went up for partner. It wasn’t perfect, but it was pretty close as people were really nervous and conservative even though they wouldn’t be audited until years later.
There was also a lot of stuff where unemployment paid more than working so there were perverse incentives to not work and make more money. I had a family member who normally made about$2k/month. He got $600/week in unemployment so took a long time to go back while making an extra $500 per month. Stupidly, he bought a car with the extra money (but he’s been able to keep making the payments).
Just having some cap that paid 80% of your salary in unemployment would have been super simple to implement.
Or some programs ran for over a year. So the emergency stuff could have phased out after 3 months or 6 months.
There’s lots of ways they could have designed interventions much better.
On an instinctive level I prefer hearing a story like this to the kind of story that would have been more common/worse without the very broad aid that was given, but perhaps this sort of event is quite damaging as well. I'm not sure it's possible, but it would be interesting to see attempts at quantifying the difference.
> Just having some cap that paid 80% of your salary in unemployment would have been super simple to implement.
There is nothing super simple about government unemployment insurance programs, especially in recent years. What about Uber drivers, per diem nurses, people whose employer was dependent on events in Wuhan so their pay was cut?
Even if there are easy answers to these questions, UI is administered by the states so there are going to be more than 50 versions of each answer.
How is that close to perfect? I assure you that some people who would need and actually deserve that payout wouldn't apply for it just out of the irrational fear that it will cause them problems later.
Many of the people who got the stimulus checks didn't need them. Same with the advanced child tax credits (increases spending when it looks like you have more money). This was true for myself and many coworkers. There were others who needed it. It was far from perfect though.
"What's exactly the problem? Aren't people free to spend their own money any way they feel like it?"
Yes they are free to do that. It causes problems when there's a disconnect between value and price. Many of the activities were trading or gambling, which are not beneficial. That gambling affects prices and the market, thus affecting others.
Think about what happens when's there's a rush on a bank. A bunch of people acting stupidly in large numbers can create a negative environment for everyone else.
that's not people acting stupidly - a bank run happens when trust in the banking system drops to below a critical threshold. This trust might be eroded by some external event, and mishandling by the governing authority etc.
it is rational then, as an individual who cannot change the authority's handling, to take action to protect one's own interest.
> Yes they are free to do that. It causes problems when there's a disconnect between value and price. Many of the activities were trading or gambling, which are not beneficial.
they are beneficial from the point of view of the person doing it.
It isn't the activity that causes the problem - it's that those activity is funded by taxpayer money, not their own!
Something can be rational and unreasonable at the same time. It seems you answered your own question from your previous comment - it creates a problem for others based on them acting on their own self interest.
"they are beneficial from the point of view of the person doing it."
Just because it's beneficial for one person doesn't mean it can't be a problem for others.
"It isn't the activity that causes the problem - it's that those activity is funded by taxpayer money, not their own!"
Even if it were their own money, it would still cause problems. Although it's questionable if they would have participated in that behavior without the extra money.
The "geniuses" in GME, Stonks, WSB, etc telegraph to the entire world what they're going to do via their subreddit, then give the trading house even more data showing how many people follow through on particular "talk", allowing the trading house to accurately predict what sort of activity a post will generate.
They think they're incredibly smart when really all they did was fuel the world's largest pump-and-dump scam. /r/GME was deeply depressing during some of the crashes, with people sharing poverty-food recipes not just to help people get by who had lost more than their disposable income, but to help people buy even more stock.
A lot of people got swept up in the hype and got left holding the bag after the initial set of meme investors made their money and got out.
It has led to an unprecedented sticky-inflation that can only be brought down by inducing a recession.
It's not that there were warned by prominent economists https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/11/inflation-larry-summ...
The way the US tax system works meant that non-residents got the cheque as well (because they have to file taxes). Non-residents are usually able to reduce their tax liability to zero, so a US citizen earning over 200k but not living in the US would get a cheque mailed to them.
> "are we now held accountable by a righteous capitalism police"
I would argue that yes, if you are getting free money from the government to help sustain you during trying times it is reasonable to say it shouldn't be used for gambling. I don't think we are impinging on anyones freedom to say they can't spend their food stamps at a casino.
Whether it _should_ only have gone to those who needed it, or just to everyone, is another question.
Yes, they are free to spend their own money that way…evidenced by the fact that they weren’t prevented from spending their money that way. Other people are also free to call their choices stupid.
"I know you took this job because there wasn't really an interview, you don't have a real boss, you work whenever you feel like it, you don't have to do anything you don't already do every day and it's just so hard to find a job in the Great Resignation, but now you want to cry foul because there's no job security due to people not having enough money to stuff their faces full of shit for a few weeks, so here's some extra cash. 'Murika!" "Oh! It wasn't enough that we paused student loans for all of 2020 and 2021, so we're going to keep extending that, even knowing many of you will just bedmaking minimum payments until the remaining balance falls off (I know doctors making six figures who have been doing this since before the most recent pandemic)."
Full disclosure: I was unemployed for about half of 2020, didn't ever take unemployment and survived on my VA disability while actively pursuing employment. I have also currently paid 80% of my student loans after graduating in 2016. We should be teaching the next generation how to survive in this increasingly dysfunctional world, not letting them believe that some person/organisation will always be there to bail us out after every stupid decision. Apparently, you haven't noticed, but the US brand of capitalism and the stupid idea that we'll just keep throwing money at every problem is literally destroying the planet.
I think you have the relationship inversely related. The stimulus was -because- people were not working, which was because there was a global pandemic that was also incredibly mishandled by the gov
It wasn’t a stimulus. It wasn’t COVID related either. It was income redistribution. I might respect it to some extent if people called it what it was.
And in the end it was redistribution from the lower to the upper class. The last two years were the biggest wealth transfer in history. And "wealth" is so much more than just money... we absolutely screwed our kids in a way that will impact them for quite some time.
Could you please elaborate? I think the way the US did it's COVID stimulus was outstanding and very close to the ideal way to actually address people's potential needs.
> - People spending that stimulus money to invest (often for the first time) on zero-fee platforms like Robin Hood
What's exactly the problem? Aren't people free to spend their own money any way they feel like it? Or are we now held accountable by a righteous capitalism police to determine if an expense we make is kosher?
> - Meme stock investors intentionally manipulating stock prices to cause them to diverge from the underlying value of the company
What's exactly the problem? I mean, who are you to tell what's the "underlying value" of something, specially in a free market economy?
It seems to me that worst case scenario the people spending their money on stocks are only gambling their own money, and best case scenario they profit from their own investment.