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Comment by PaulDavisThe1st | Hacker News Reader

That would be true if corporations were just given money. But as I understand it, that's not what NZ did.

The US actually did a fairly smart thing with the initial aid package - corporations got loans that were forgiven if used to pay wages. The problem was that we (the government) didn't do anything to establish whether a company actually needed help with this.

I wonder why that happened ....

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There was also a ton of fraud (some estimates were 1/3 of the money went to scammers and foreign people). They didn't have a good way to check if a business was an actual business or not. This resulted in entire neighborhoods of people getting 10K each by sharing the scam [2].

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-12-24/small-bus...

[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-10-29/small-bus...

What's the demographic of the scammers? Are they immoral rich people who don't need the money and just love the idea of scamming the government? Are they poor people desperate enough to steal from the government? If the latter then the stimulus was actually quite well spent.

A lot of the money went to gangs in foreign countries. There were some stories of immoral rich people like the rapper who got over a million dollars and boasted about it, but I imagine most were dishonest poor people. The problem is this rewards a small pool of scammers, and the honest poor are left even further behind.

But it sounds like you want to believe it was money well spent, so I don't imagine this would convince you otherwise.

It will forever be a mystery as to why there was so much corruption surrounding the Covid business loans and payments.

https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2020-06-16/hiltzik-co...

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