College students who weren't planning to have any income anyway before Covid hit. And that's at least still a relatively "legitimate" payout compared to the screw-ups like sending money to prisoners [0].
But really both cases are massively massively dwarfed by anyone who could fog a mirror starting an LLC and getting $40k to $250k of PPP money. I personally know a couple people who should go to jail for this (but probably won't even have to repay the money, let alone repay with interest, let alone get in trouble).
Reminds me of water conservation focusing on personal use versus industrial agriculture in the middle of literal deserts. Or the output of a Toyota Camry versus a container ship.
Same reason we're told to stop eating beef and take public transport to fight climate change, and almost nothing about reducing population or taxing and punishing fossil fuel cartels and profiteers.
Yeah. We got stimulus checks we didn't need. I think that was the right thing to do, though--they would have come out a lot later if they had to go through and try to figure out who needs them. Especially since both of us are self-employed, the IRS simply gets the quarterly estimated payments and nothing about what we are actually making until we file the tax return.
PPP was a fraudster's paradise, though. The idea was good, the implementation was not so good.
> College students who weren't planning to have any income anyway before Covid hit. And that's at least still a relatively "legitimate" payout compared to the screw-ups like sending money to prisoners [0].
Where exactly do you see a problem with that? To put it differently, do you feel it's better to arbitrarily discriminate against elements of your society with a program intended to actually help everyone everywhere?
More importantly, what leads you to believe that the goal of the COVID stimulus was to help individuals instead of society as a whole? Think about it for a second. In a moment in time where circumstances were leading to an unprecedented economic crunch, wouldn't a bottom-up consumer side stimulus help economy stay afloat?
Because college students yolo-ing on Gamestop options isn't especially productive for society.
But, as I said, my bigger issue is the massive PPP fraud. And my issue with massive fraud on the scale of hundreds of billions of dollars is that the US is already deeply in debt.
And my issue with the nation being deeply in debt is that future generations will have to pay for the profligate spending of this one, which I find immoral.
College students who weren't planning to have any income anyway before Covid hit. And that's at least still a relatively "legitimate" payout compared to the screw-ups like sending money to prisoners [0].
But really both cases are massively massively dwarfed by anyone who could fog a mirror starting an LLC and getting $40k to $250k of PPP money. I personally know a couple people who should go to jail for this (but probably won't even have to repay the money, let alone repay with interest, let alone get in trouble).
[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2022/04/05/gover...