The bulk of the funds should have been allocated to retailers and restaurants that were literally forced to close by local and state orders. Funds that went to

The bulk of the funds should have been allocated to retailers and restaurants that were literally forced to close by local and state orders. Funds that went to large non-retail businesses, like airlines, should have had far more strings attached. As the CARES Act was written, it placed a 12 month moratorium on stock buybacks, dividends, and executive pay increases but allowed those restrictions to be waived by the Fed and/or Treasury on a case by case basis, and they often were waived. Those restrictions should have had a time horizon closer to 5 years, and no waivers should have been permitted. In many ways, this mirrored the bank bailouts of 2008-9. If the government is going to save your corporation from extinction, then it needs to receive something in return - at a minimum, shareholders need to take a haircut as they would in a bankruptcy proceeding. The policy objective should have been to protect the overall economy from the demise of critical industries, not the preservation of existing shareholder wealth.