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Comment by monocularvision | Hacker News Reader

Because that program was designed from the beginning to be forgiven. It was about keeping businesses afloat during extraordinary times and keep paychecks going to folks. People who compare student loan forgiveness to PPP are not making a good faith argument.

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It certainly wasn't sold to the public as "these are going to be forgiven". After all they are called loans not grants. And given all the retoric around "it's simple you took out a loan, now you pay it back" or "why should my tax dollars pay for your loan forgiveness" I think it's very fair to why this logic applies to people not businesses.

It was literally in the bill when it passed! What are you talking about? I very distinctly remember this being promoted as part of the package.

The deal was “if a business spends a percentage this money on payroll, it will be forgive”. It was designed to keep businesses afloat for a set amount of time as we locked down for COVID.

It's in all the news articles from the time. The loans were forgivable if they used them for payroll and didn't fire anyone for a certain period.

https://www.npr.org/2020/03/26/821457551/whats-inside-the-se...

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/26/business/coronavirus-stim...

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/small-businesses-face-nightm...

They were sold to the public as "if you don't fire people during the pandemic, they will be forgiven"

Sorry, wouldn't student loans be about keeping businesses afloat during extraordinary times? Otherwise they risk losing a workforce that otherwise would've come out of college during the pandemic?

That's a good to society as well. Arguably one with likely better payoff given that a lot more college graduates succeed in getting a degree than businesses succeeded in paying their PPP loans.

Most of the money wasn’t used for business expenses or payroll. That’s why it even ended up in the forgiveness bin. It was so unregulated that it was a joke that anyone used it for what the program was intended for.

that would be like 0.765% of PPP loans… (I got two of them as self-employed running as S-Corp, certainly did not need either and didn’t even want to apply until I realized that Los Angeles Lakers have…)

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