Of course there were problems with the wrong people getting their hands on the money. If you actually put up a ton of filters to make sure the wrong people didn't get the money, it would have delayed the actual people needing money from getting it. The right thing to do is to hand out the money fast and go after the abusers later.
These comments are the reason why the small guys always gets the short end of the stick. The big companies have their army of people to solve problems. The small guys are the ones who need it fast without the bureaucracy. Comments like "too much waste" and "shameful" do not hurt the big companies one bit. They just put up another road block for the small guys.
Chicago used 60% (300million) of relief funds on police personnel costs, it's not just the business aspect that was fucked: https://blockclubchicago.org/2021/02/18/chicago-used-60-of-d...
So can arms dealers. We’re worsening inflation by flooding military contractors with money too.
In my opinion, this is not a winning strategy. It takes magnitudes more efforts to go after criminals and recover misappropriated money than to prevent the crime in the first place.
P.S.; I'm not an American, so I don't think I have much say in judging how you guys spend your taxes, anyway.
Honestly who cares if a bunch of gambling addicts and dumb kids lost money on GME or Luna? The real economy is safe for now.
I don't think we are in the clear already. Just take a look at the markets right now.
Was it poor record keeping or was it fraud? Companies sprang up just in time to receive loans, including a bunch in California named things like "88 Cloud Computing". All of the names in this case had 88 in them, which is often code for neo-nazi crap (88->HH->Heil Hitler).
It helped those who needed it, sure, but the deliberate sabotage of record keeping and oversight seems intentional.
Those four companies - 88 Cloud Computing LLC, 88 Enterprise Services LLC, 88 Investment Empire LLC and 88 Venture Capital LLC - each received between $350,000 and $1 million in loans within the span of a week in June 2020. The four companies purportedly provide cloud computing and investment services and two of them listed 24 employees each; however the address of all four businesses is a home in an affluent South Bay suburb.
The money was supposed to be given to those who could spend it, to help keep all our small/medium/large businesses as healthy as possible.
Agreed, and providing direct payments to people who are working to put together food or pay their rent makes perfect sense to me. The potential disasters we would have seen if we hadn't done that would've been horrible.
And providing loans to small businesses so they can keep functioning also makes sense. But firing the inspectors who are supposed to oversee the small business loans (as they always have done), blocking pushes for basic transparency of even what businesses receive the loans, and then "forgiving" 97% of all loans as a gift from the govt is beyond wildly irresponsible.
Not really directed at you, I'm just sick of the idea that if we all get together and declare things good or bad, that's some sort of accomplishment. People who do well do well through ignoring the irrelevant and immaterial comments of busybodies and bikeshedders.
Overall I think my suffering-footprint is tiny compared to most so maybe I'm okay with being a bit more unethical in some areas of my life. But I'm unsure.
The comment is much more as a counterpoint to the existing dogma of valuing an individual's contribution to society primarily based on ability to amass capital (i.e. splashy magazine covers based on net worth - which often translates to percentage ownership of a company valued on the price paid by the last marginal buyer).
I can't speak for everyone, but I have simply decided to opt-out wherever possible; I'm not going to fight against a system that has moated itself out of obsolescence. If startup culture has taught me anything it's been to learn when to expend your energy matters more than you may think as it compounds over time. If you're constantly deluding yourself there is reform in a system that is designed to be this way, you'll be in incapable of creating viable alternatives.
I had qualms about how poor the US education system--I went to both private and public schools--when I was student, I couldn't fathom just how much we spent and how poor the results were in almost all facets until I realized that this was exactly what it was intended to be: a bloated bureaucratic system designed to siphon funds from the pubic coffers into private hands and enrich an administrative class who seem content with throwing out what they feel impedes them meeting their easily manipulated metrics.
With that said, I still think the airline bailout was the real takeaway of how this whole debacle was managed [0] in the US. It's the typical Socialism for the rich, ruthless Capitalism for the poor playing out all over again as we saw in 2008. Failing up happened, and the stock market and housing market rallied in the midst of mass unemployment and re-opening problems for small businesses etc... this is all make-believe, and it has been for most of my Life, too. It would be almost laughable, in a jaded George Carlin way, if it didn't have such dire consequences: homelessness, and over-dose death due to substance abuse is a pandemic itself.
Personally speaking, after having done sales for my fintech startup, I learned to do the same: but I'm realizing just how internally jaded it has made me about most things in Life. It has a spill-over effect that didn't really dawn me until much later in Life long after I left tech for a while, and returned to culinary whose work force is mainly the 'working poor' who constantly get screwed over. I've helped several of my friends get over the worst situation, and I'm glad they are mostly doing better, but it isn't by much after inflation and perpetual rent hikes.
The extent to which it happened to help out people in need or "the economy" was secondary.
The loans were meant to be used for payroll but the process was so opaque and full of loopholes that business owners could simply play a shell game and keep the funds, or some people even created businesses to receive it.
What irritates me is that this is another instance the heavily flawed "trickle down" concept. Companies time and time again act against the best interest of individuals. PPP only further enriched a small subset of business owners at the expense of individual taxpayers.
A clear wink-and-a-handshake "deal" to funnel huge amounts of government money into corporations with minimal oversight.
If the money had gone directly to people instead, it could have been spent as normal, and that would have done more to help local SMALL businesses stay afloat. Plus the business owners who had to close for lockdowns would have been receiving regular benefits too and rent/loans should have been suspended.
This concern could have been allayed by keeping the funds in a bank account until certain of forgiveness. Absent said forgiveness one repays the loan using the retained funds.
> still seem to be staring at the beginning...
Isn't that the whole point of preventative measures?
"not nothing": could have used less money.
Relatedly, getting a recession now does not at all mean these measures were not successful or that this recession is at all similar to the one that was prevented.
But not all lenders were banks. My company got its two PPP loans through ReadyCapital. My company had zero previous relationship with them.
I think the fear of a Depression was real, and the government was willing to pull the level on the most outrageous tool they had, which was drop money from the skies into the pockets of people who could spend it.
Of course I think that was wrong, but I know exactly where this came from, and it was a playbook that was broadcasted by Bernanke I believe decades ago to fight a Depression. At least we can all agree that it worked, although a little too well, which is why asset prices have skyrocketed and inflation has gone horribly wrong.
Well of course, the situation was vastly different. First, in most EU countries there were very few people losing their jobs due to various existing or expanded temporary/partial/etc. unemployment schemes which meant that people kept their jobs, but were paid by the local government instead of the business. Second, the ECB didn't have the required authority to do what needed to be done, and it required negotiations between the eurozone members to agree on how to proceed in regards to loans. And third, actions were taken locally at each government level.
We saw the same thing with unemployment--the system got overwhelmed so they quit checking and the result was a lot of identity thieves collected unemployment for workers who weren't actually unemployed. (Of course the real problem is the unemployment system has been deliberately kept dysfunctional because that reduces the amount they have to pay out.)
No really explain that logic as when we give tax credits to business we do not then again use the same screwed up logic
the biggest example, the Trump org tax credit check from early 2000s. in fact now that the IRs know it was base don fraud there still asking for it back.
The PPP was much different than the other forms of stimulus. It either went to employees, or it had to be paid back. The interest on the loan was low though.
I doubt much of PPP funds were being used in the meme trading game.
To have the loan forgiven, you had to submit documents at tax time to verify it or it became a low interest loan that had to be paid back.
PPP was one of the best ideas that came out of locking down the entire country because otherwise a tooooon of people would have been laid off immediately. Instead, even people who couldn’t do any work at all due to lack of child care were able to be paid, maintain insurance and benefits. They had to act so quickly.
The OP comment didn't mention the PPP specifically as stimulus.
The context of the article, is individuals investing money in meme stocks.
The PPP went to business owners (with the assumption they would pay employees rather than laying them off) and likely wasn't being used for meme stocks.
I was reading through the WSB Reddit sub at the time. There was a lot of chatter there about people using their personal stimulus payments for investing in meme stocks.
I also spent a lot of time on Reddit subs checking chatter on PPP and EIDL. Of the two, my guess is there was a lot more widespread fraud (more people involved, but with smaller disbursements) with the EIDL. The EIDL was giving out 1K per employee (up to 10K) for anyone who claimed they were business owners. That didn't have to be paid back.
From the stimulus the worst of the offenses by far happend in the PPP for small business. It was absoutely shameful.
While there was of course waste in the direct treasury payments to citizens, they get way overrepresented compared to what happened in the PPP. It's the same human nature of: If a big company gets 100M of our taxes for no reason, people grumble a bit, but if their next door neighboor gets an extra $100 and they don't, you never hear the end of it.
The PPP was rife with waste, but by design you'll hear way more media and people complain about the co-worker they know of or cousin that spent $1000 on trading cards.
Edit: And skipping my rant that it was by design that the PPP had no transparency and the adminstration fired the inspectors general that would oversee the program for waste to avoid transparency.
Edit: And to be clear it's fine to have untargeted stimulus for people to cover day to day expenses, and also fine to have loans to businesses to keep things afloat. But to intentionally do so with blocking transparency, and removing oversite officials is just creating a cesspool for waste.