Especially concerning when a bunch of politicians were in on it, ensuring that the money went out willy-nilly and that $700+ billion in "loans" were turned into a straight up gift from the taxpayers.
https://www.citizensforethics.org/reports-investigations/cre...
https://fortune.com/2020/07/08/ppp-loan-recipients-members-o...
Wasn't that widely understood during the pandemic? All the coverage I've seen mentioned that the loans for forgivable if certain criteria were met, and nobody was like "yeah it's fine because it's a loan!".
And then these loans were just forgiven. And since they went to businesses, Republicans are completely silent about that.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paycheck_Protection_Program
There are _some_ decent Democrats in the Congress. There are also plenty of bad ones. There are NO decent Republicans in the Congress. And yes, reality appears to be partisan.
To the topic in question, PPP was not really a big deal. The real culprit is this: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CP - the corporate profits literally DOUBLED since 2020 because of earlier Trump's tax cuts.
Not really. If you add data series for pre-tax profits and index both series to 2020, you see the two lines are basically on top of each other.