Hacker News Reader

Comment by aaronblohowiak | Hacker News Reader

This is the most important and often under-looked thing in this whole thread. This will further lead to wealth gaps and difficulty for working people to "get ahead".

View on HN

I think we're long past the days when working people were trying to "get ahead" and they are now just trying not to fall too far behind.

And that is on top of the mismanagement of PPP funds after the IG over that was fired and replaced with a loyalist. We are only starting to see where billion of tax dollars went including a large chunk to churches and millions to Kanye West and campaign donors/supporters. If one has an issue with looting by protestors, they really need to look at the looting by the wealthy. Not just PPP loan abuse but also historically low tax rates and a pass for environmental abuse too.

This is an inherent problem with need-based things -- they are ripe for abuse. If you have universal things, the abuse is part of the design ;) IOW: if instead of PPP being only for certain kinds of companies or institutions it were all of them then a) there is far less to administer b) they get more support and c) you dont have moralistic temptations or arguments. UBI vs SSI, universal healthcare vs medicare, etc etc.

Yes, this means wealthy people will get the same checks as the poor -- but that is a feature, not a bug. Sorry for the soapbox.

There was oversight for PPP, but the president fired the IG over the program and replaced them with a loyalist right before the fund went live. The administration then refused to provide data on who got loans until sued. Now we know that the Sec of Transportation and husband Mitch McConnell, the new USPS head who appears to be trying to crush mail in voting internally, and many other government officials received loans for millions. If one was to condemn protesting due to looting, imaging the response to misappropriating billions in tax dollars to corporations, supporters, and corrupt officials.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com