As someone whose own consultancy provides services to a couple dozen of these small businesses, primarily ones which happened to fall under the rubric of "essen

As someone whose own consultancy provides services to a couple dozen of these small businesses, primarily ones which happened to fall under the rubric of "essential services", I noted that nearly all of them received outsize PPP awards (on the order of half a million and up for 30-ish person companies, which had no shortage of income due to being among the aforementioned essential businesses). These were almost immediately forgiven. In most cases the businesses were able to apply twice and get two separate awards. I'm not sure what the mechanism was for this as our business itself never applied for these loans. In the aftermath of all of this there has been a distinct pattern emerging in which these small business owners have developed a kind of amnesia about the money they've received from these loans and have assigned the upward balance sheet inflection to their own "hard work" commitment and demonstrated acumen in negotiating the covid crisis. I suppose this isn't exactly untrue, but there is no internalized recognition that this success was a one-time phenomenon due to a one-time windfall from the government. Another anecdote somewhat unrelated is that the number of family-run (i.e. father and son/s) trades businesses in my local suburb all seem to have decided they need brand new work trucks at the same time. These vehicles are uniformly the upper end luxury trim levels of the line, lifted and stanced to absurdly aggressive proportions, and show no signs of being put to any of the actual work for which they would be utterly impractical anyway. The number of rear window stickers with Sparta helmets or some sort of depiction of an automatic weapon suggests the PPP loans may end up having inadvertently helped equip and arm a future informal militia.