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Comment by mirchiseth | Hacker News Reader

I believed the same as well but then last year when I went back to my family doctor after more than 1.5 years, I got to hear another version. My doctor belongs to a group of doctors who have 4-5 offices around San Francisco bayarea. They have been in business for 25+ years and I have been with them for 15+ years. I asked him how did they do during the covid. His response shocked me - he said they came very close to closing their practice and PPP was what saved them. Of course no one was visiting them during pandemic but even when things started opening up they had staff shortages.

I am sure similar scenario would have happened for a lot of people and at the same time some businesses would have taken undue advantage of this as well.

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Similar experience on the lower end of the economic spectrum. A local restaurant I love and have frequented for years was saved by PPP. As you can imagine, their employees were among the most economically vulnerable. With PPP they were able to send their people home and keep paying them during the downtime. Without that they'd have been finished.

But as you acknowledge, I'm sure there was abuse. I'll bet there was a lot of it. Gov't needed to get the money out the door fast, and it did, at the cost of some oversight. Hopefully next time we'll do it smarter.

> Hopefully next time we'll do it smarter.

I'm not sure how much smarter you can get. Fighting fraud and security in general is a cat-and-mouse game with a fundamental trade-off of convenience/expeditiousness vs. preventing fraud. When you need to get large amount of money out to a nation in a very small span of time, there might just be an unavoidably high floor on the amount of fraud that will happen.

Because otherwise you get flooded with all sorts of heart-breaking stories of people who were denied money due to some bureaucratic inconvenience put in place to fight fraud.

Exactly. It was a best effort move to reduce fraud and exploitation while still providing the desired benefits. You had to wager that the loan would be forgiven and you had to be approved for the loan by an established lender.

Heart-breaking stories aside, it would have taken far more time and money to roll out a new government bureaucracy merely to duplicate a vetting service banks already provide.

Estonia has a robust digital government infrastructure that made payments easy and much less apt for fraud.

Estonia has a population the size of Maine.

That’s not an argument against digital government infrastructure.

You made no argument for it.

I did, it makes distributing government payouts harder to scam.

You didn't make an argument. You just made an unsupported claim. You did not compare fraud rates, you did not measure costs or benefits, you did not account for the urgency of the established by the context or make any attempt to assess relative feasibility. You made no argument.

More importantly, embedded in your claim is the assumption that comparing two different states with multiple order-of-magnitude differences in size and complexity should be accepted without question. Imagine deploying a solution for a class of 32 students in two weeks. Now imagine you have to do that for an entire university community of 8,000 people including all faculty, staff, and administration. You must account for on-campus and off-campus students; part-time, full-time, and remote employees; labor-oriented staff who do never use computers at work, multiple languages, bureaucratic restrictions to account for, politicking within different departments, and so on. Here's the kicker: you still have the same two weeks you had for the classroom project.

It's an absurd comparison that should never be made without clear disclaimers, caveats and careful specificity about the point.

So is this an argument? You're not comparing any real data either, just making a hypothetical comparison. Can I do that too?

Imagine if every state issued their own digital ID that was part of a national federated system of PKE. That is, each state trusts the certificate authority in each other state, and the fed trusts the states. There's some mechanism to sign into a federal website and to transfer money to a bank account, or perhaps a mechanism involving showing up to a postal office, who knows. Compare this to dispersing funds quickly but without any verification of identity.

By doing the work up front to be able to quickly verify identities it means that the fraud prevention happens before the fact.

Do you think the $76 billion would have been better spent on digital infrastructure or written off as fraud? And what about the next time there's a need for helicopter money?

You know the DoD is fazing out CAC and there's a lot of very cheap tooling around PKE digital IDs...

Doesn’t help when the administration makes it hard to do effective oversight[1]

1. https://www.politico.com/news/2020/04/07/trump-removes-indep...

If we are really smart there won't be a next time where people roll over and let the idiot politicians shut everything down.

Hopefully next time we'll do it smarter by not imposing any lockdowns or forcibly closing businesses.

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