The amount of fraud in the PPP program alone might be north of $80B. And the fraud in the other programs isn't inconsequential either. "large direct payments" is a joke, right? $2500 for a family? That's about one month's income for people who had lost their jobs. And many states decided not to extend their unemployment, or to limit it drastically because business interests started to complain about not being able to find enough wage slaves.

How large?

It was only like $1200 for individuals.

More for families, many state programs which added to this, hundreds of billions of federal funding to states for responses.

And much expanded unemployment payments, +$600 and +$300 *weekly on top of normal unemployment for long periods, as well as significantly expanded eligibility for who could get it and for how long.

Plenty of people made more money unemployed for significant amounts of time than they did with their jobs pre-pandemic.

Something like 10% of the population was on unemployment for a good while.

The people making more money from unemployment were not high wage earners to begin with. They were struggling to bet by. Look at this breakdown of the sorts of jobs that recieved more in benefits than wages and those that didn't. Skilled labor like nursing saw less earnings even with the CARES act under unemployment. The people who saw substantial gains were in fields like food service, not known to be a field that lets you get by in most high cost of living areas as it is.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/many-americans-are-gett...