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.
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.