Comment by nouveaux | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nouveaux | Hacker News Reader

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This and the arm chair government spending police in this thread is completely wrong. The PPP helped a ton of small businesses who needed it. I, along with many small business owners in our industry got PPP, used it correctly on employee payroll, rent and utilities. It took me all of 30 min to apply for each of the PPP rounds. It took me about the same amount of time to apply for forgiveness.

Of course there were problems with the wrong people getting their hands on the money. If you actually put up a ton of filters to make sure the wrong people didn't get the money, it would have delayed the actual people needing money from getting it. The right thing to do is to hand out the money fast and go after the abusers later.

These comments are the reason why the small guys always gets the short end of the stick. The big companies have their army of people to solve problems. The small guys are the ones who need it fast without the bureaucracy. Comments like "too much waste" and "shameful" do not hurt the big companies one bit. They just put up another road block for the small guys.

The wrong people getting the money is exactly what people are criticizing. I think you just disagree on the ways of preventing it.

Chicago used 60% (300million) of relief funds on police personnel costs, it's not just the business aspect that was fucked: https://blockclubchicago.org/2021/02/18/chicago-used-60-of-d...

Is that PPP?

It had an impact on keeping paychecks going to people, cops can buy meme stocks.

So can arms dealers. We’re worsening inflation by flooding military contractors with money too.

Hmm, I thought the thread was about how well or badly PPP was organized. If other stimulus measures, or defense spending was badly managed, that doesn't really mean that PPP was badly managed.

> The right thing to do is to hand out the money fast and go after the abusers later.

In my opinion, this is not a winning strategy. It takes magnitudes more efforts to go after criminals and recover misappropriated money than to prevent the crime in the first place.

P.S.; I'm not an American, so I don't think I have much say in judging how you guys spend your taxes, anyway.

This isn't something being advocated as a general strategy. This is an emergency relief strategy, and it makes sense in that context.

In a crisis - and covid was one that came about as fast as war to Ukraine - the thing that matters most is speed.

Yep I remember how everyone thought COVID would lead to a depression.

Honestly who cares if a bunch of gambling addicts and dumb kids lost money on GME or Luna? The real economy is safe for now.

> Yep I remember how everyone thought COVID would lead to a depression.

I don't think we are in the clear already. Just take a look at the markets right now.

It also takes magnitudes more efforts to means-test than to simply distribute resources equally, yet here we are.

I went through some of the PPP records and found some seemingly fraudulent things, like a youth baseball club receiving an absurd amount of money.

Was it poor record keeping or was it fraud? Companies sprang up just in time to receive loans, including a bunch in California named things like "88 Cloud Computing". All of the names in this case had 88 in them, which is often code for neo-nazi crap (88->HH->Heil Hitler).

It helped those who needed it, sure, but the deliberate sabotage of record keeping and oversight seems intentional.

Sequential 8s are also lucky in Chinese.

The person who filed the paperwork for these companies had an Asian surname, so this is far more likely.

https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/lebnitz-tran-san-j...

Those four companies - 88 Cloud Computing LLC, 88 Enterprise Services LLC, 88 Investment Empire LLC and 88 Venture Capital LLC - each received between $350,000 and $1 million in loans within the span of a week in June 2020. The four companies purportedly provide cloud computing and investment services and two of them listed 24 employees each; however the address of all four businesses is a home in an affluent South Bay suburb.

It sure feels like the "business owner" fleeced the USA out of a few million dollars.

That particular one was arrested and is facing hundreds of years of prison sentences (multiple counts of fraud, etc).

No one had said stimulus wasn't needed. It's perfectly valid to believe that PPP was bad policy and also that a targeted stimulus was necessary.

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