5 ms·

The PPP was designed to obviously benefit the businesses that needed it the least: 1) For any business that is fine or growing with COVID. PPP is free money. 2)

The PPP was designed to obviously benefit the businesses that needed it the least: 1) For any business that is fine or growing with COVID. PPP is free money. 2) Your business is in severe trouble with COVID, so you can't even have employees working productively. You can just give them the money, or use the PPP loan as a bridge loan, but you have to pay it back. It's low interest, but relatively short term and you had to start paying it back before COVID is even over. I think in hindsight all of these loans should have clearly been truly loans, probably leveraging the existing SBA disaster loan program. This is a great program, was already working and distributed some money in COVID. 30 year loans at like 3%, with a personal guarantee. Basically for any business owner who just needs money to bridge a disaster (the purported target of the PPP), this is way better. And anyone who doesn't need the money, won't take it (saving the taxpayers billions). It's unclear what the losses on this overall would have been, since its a loan, but I think its reasonably likely to be in the $10B to $100B range (instead of the $953B the PPP turned out to be).

jlmorton 5y ago
In hindsight, it should have been structured like Germany's Kurzarbeit ("short-time working") program. Impacted businesses simply furlough employees they don't have work for. Employers continue to pay furloughed employees 70% of their salary, and the government reimburses businesses for the cost of the furloughed employees' salaries. There are no loans, no unemployment insurance. There is nothing employees need to apply for, and no Byzantine rules. Employees just get furloughed and continue to get 70% of their paycheck in the exact same way they always have, and businesses get reimbursed. When the crisis is over, businesses bring their employees back to work, and there's no major economic churn. Everyone goes right back to what they were doing before, assuming they still want to.
- wyager 5y ago
  In hindsight, the government shouldn't have precipitated the conditions that justified these "loans" in the first place. The whole putative point of this (reducing covid deaths) was obviously ineffective and/or a red herring. Of course, if you think the actual point was liquidation of Kulaks, it was quite effective at that.
  - kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 5y ago
    > The whole putative point of this (reducing covid deaths) was obviously ineffective Yesterday's conspiracy theory is tomorrow's news[1] [1] https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/jan/31/lockdowns-had-little-or-no-impact-covid-19-deaths-/ https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/jan/31/lockdowns-h...
    - nosianu 5y ago
      AFAIK the main purpose first and foremost was to prevent the health system from collapsing. Everything else was secondary. Take the spike out of the incidence rate to spread hospital admissions out over time. It would not affect how many got infected, not even deaths directly - the only way to reduce deaths would be if in the meantime better treatments could be developed, more people getting vaccinated, and enough hospital (especially ICU) capacity for the severe cases being available. So death prevention was an indirect effect and not the direct target. For some strange reason, I rarely see this main target being mentioned in discussions, especially not of the "deniers", for example when they point to "it's my own problem the government should not tell me what to do", neglecting that having to be hospitalized does make it everybody else's problem too. The question is not the death rate, even if it was exactly the same (which I highly doubt, given that we achieved a significant vaccination rate demonstrably reducing severe cases, and better treatments), the question that the COVID measures should be evaluated against is if we indeed managed out spread out the wave(s) over time. In the end almost everybody will have been in contact with the virus, preventing that never was the goal, only to spread it out over time. That said, I'm also curious how someone could claim "Lockdowns had little or no impact on COVID-19 deaths". Do they really claim with even more stressed ICUs and more severe cases because of less vaccinations (which only became available later) there would have been the same number of deaths? That sounds more than a bit strange to me. That said, I'm not at all opposed to critical review of the measures. Many did seem a bit off, for example continuing to limit outdoor movement when it had already been shown that the main problem was prolonged closed-room indoor exposure. I also see curious patterns when I look at the incidence map of Germany. Right now the southern East German states, the ones with the most opposition to COVID measures, are much lighter (much lower incidence rate) -- https://www.zeit.de/wissen/aktuelle-corona-zahlen-karte-deutschland-landkreise https://www.zeit.de/wissen/aktuelle-corona-zahlen-karte-deut... (at the time of posting this link those mentioned states are significantly lighter than the entire rest of the country, for the second time, at other times they were/are deeper red) Just a few weeks ago they were the deep red ones. The newspapers only reported when those regions had worse numbers, now for the second time their numbers are much better than that of the rest of Germany for the second time and again not a single mention of it in the media. I don't want them to interpret it, I think that remains open without good study, I'm only talking about merely even just mentioning the fact, but nothing. That is quite some selective attention to only the negatives.
- nerdponx 5y ago
  My impression of PPP is that this was more or less the stated intention. Hard to say whether deviating from that was malice or incompetence.
  - wayoutthere 5y ago
    Why can’t it be both? The previous administration was malevolently incompetent, as opposed to the current one that is simply incompetent.
  - gscott 5y ago
    There were some employers who did this. They forced their ex employees off unemployment. The employees didn't like this because unemployment paid significantly more than their old wage. Ppp essentally forced some people back into poverty.
    - realityking 5y ago
      I‘m not american but I‘m struggling to understand how someone‘s unemployment can be higher than their wage. Do you have a link with an explanation?
      - dragonwriter 5y ago
        > I’m not american but I’m struggling to understand how someone‘s unemployment can be higher than their wage. Unemployment in the US is state-based, and usually a fraction of recent-past monthly income. During the pandemic, there was an emergency boost designed to bring the average unemployment benefit up to full wage, but this was implement (for simplicity) as a flat $ amoung on top of the usual state unemployment benefit, not a change to the formula. So, lower wage workers ended up above 100% of their recent-past wage while the emergency enhancement was in effect.

jlmorton 5y ago

In hindsight, it should have been structured like Germany's Kurzarbeit ("short-time working") program. Impacted businesses simply furlough employees they don't have work for. Employers continue to pay furloughed employees 70% of their salary, and the government reimburses businesses for the cost of the furloughed employees' salaries. There are no loans, no unemployment insurance. There is nothing employees need to apply for, and no Byzantine rules. Employees just get furloughed and continue to get 70% of their paycheck in the exact same way they always have, and businesses get reimbursed. When the crisis is over, businesses bring their employees back to work, and there's no major economic churn. Everyone goes right back to what they were doing before, assuming they still want to.

wyager 5y ago
In hindsight, the government shouldn't have precipitated the conditions that justified these "loans" in the first place. The whole putative point of this (reducing covid deaths) was obviously ineffective and/or a red herring. Of course, if you think the actual point was liquidation of Kulaks, it was quite effective at that.
- kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 5y ago
  > The whole putative point of this (reducing covid deaths) was obviously ineffective Yesterday's conspiracy theory is tomorrow's news[1] [1] https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/jan/31/lockdowns-had-little-or-no-impact-covid-19-deaths-/ https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/jan/31/lockdowns-h...
  - nosianu 5y ago
    AFAIK the main purpose first and foremost was to prevent the health system from collapsing. Everything else was secondary. Take the spike out of the incidence rate to spread hospital admissions out over time. It would not affect how many got infected, not even deaths directly - the only way to reduce deaths would be if in the meantime better treatments could be developed, more people getting vaccinated, and enough hospital (especially ICU) capacity for the severe cases being available. So death prevention was an indirect effect and not the direct target. For some strange reason, I rarely see this main target being mentioned in discussions, especially not of the "deniers", for example when they point to "it's my own problem the government should not tell me what to do", neglecting that having to be hospitalized does make it everybody else's problem too. The question is not the death rate, even if it was exactly the same (which I highly doubt, given that we achieved a significant vaccination rate demonstrably reducing severe cases, and better treatments), the question that the COVID measures should be evaluated against is if we indeed managed out spread out the wave(s) over time. In the end almost everybody will have been in contact with the virus, preventing that never was the goal, only to spread it out over time. That said, I'm also curious how someone could claim "Lockdowns had little or no impact on COVID-19 deaths". Do they really claim with even more stressed ICUs and more severe cases because of less vaccinations (which only became available later) there would have been the same number of deaths? That sounds more than a bit strange to me. That said, I'm not at all opposed to critical review of the measures. Many did seem a bit off, for example continuing to limit outdoor movement when it had already been shown that the main problem was prolonged closed-room indoor exposure. I also see curious patterns when I look at the incidence map of Germany. Right now the southern East German states, the ones with the most opposition to COVID measures, are much lighter (much lower incidence rate) -- https://www.zeit.de/wissen/aktuelle-corona-zahlen-karte-deutschland-landkreise https://www.zeit.de/wissen/aktuelle-corona-zahlen-karte-deut... (at the time of posting this link those mentioned states are significantly lighter than the entire rest of the country, for the second time, at other times they were/are deeper red) Just a few weeks ago they were the deep red ones. The newspapers only reported when those regions had worse numbers, now for the second time their numbers are much better than that of the rest of Germany for the second time and again not a single mention of it in the media. I don't want them to interpret it, I think that remains open without good study, I'm only talking about merely even just mentioning the fact, but nothing. That is quite some selective attention to only the negatives.
nerdponx 5y ago
My impression of PPP is that this was more or less the stated intention. Hard to say whether deviating from that was malice or incompetence.
- wayoutthere 5y ago
  Why can’t it be both? The previous administration was malevolently incompetent, as opposed to the current one that is simply incompetent.
- gscott 5y ago
  There were some employers who did this. They forced their ex employees off unemployment. The employees didn't like this because unemployment paid significantly more than their old wage. Ppp essentally forced some people back into poverty.
  - realityking 5y ago
    I‘m not american but I‘m struggling to understand how someone‘s unemployment can be higher than their wage. Do you have a link with an explanation?
    - dragonwriter 5y ago
      > I’m not american but I’m struggling to understand how someone‘s unemployment can be higher than their wage. Unemployment in the US is state-based, and usually a fraction of recent-past monthly income. During the pandemic, there was an emergency boost designed to bring the average unemployment benefit up to full wage, but this was implement (for simplicity) as a flat $ amoung on top of the usual state unemployment benefit, not a change to the formula. So, lower wage workers ended up above 100% of their recent-past wage while the emergency enhancement was in effect.