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Originally Posted by Peter_Spaeth
Again I am no socialist, but handing massive sums of money out to the wealthy and encouraging them to spend it on luxury goods doesn't seem like the most efficient way for a government to stimulate the economy in a way that benefits the people who are most in need. Small businesses teetering on the brink, trying to keep their people working, a different matter. Anyhow Ryan, shame on you for not taking the money, you didn't do your part.
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Peter, I don't disagree with you at all, but when does the government ever seem to get anything completely right? LOL I was in the middle of all this crap with multiple clients, and nobody really knew what was going on from day to day. The government kept trying to adapt and keep up with ever increasing demands and issues from the pandemic's effect on the country overall, and was doing the best they could on the fly. And thank God they did something. Business owners I and colleagues dealt with didn't know what was going to happen, and many were running scared. With the imposed lock downs and quarantines, a lot may have just decided to close the doors and send people home. Which would have vastly increased the number of people getting on unemployment. That's one thing many people never even thought about, without the PPP loans keeping people working, the unemployment costs would have skyrocketed even more. So the government would have likely ended up paying out hundreds of billions of dollars whether they did it by PPP loans or not.
Those PPP loans gave a lot of businesses the economic cushion and confidence they needed to keep their doors open, keep people working, and keep the products and services they provided to the populace flowing. The vast majority of businesses in this country are small, closely held businesses. And they in turn employ a vast majority of the workers as well. Don't forget, PPP loans weren't available to the huge public companies with thousands and thousands of employees. They were specifically geared towards those smaller, closely held companies. And owners of such smaller, closely held companies were much more likely to simply shut down their businesses entirely rather than try to keep them going and maybe run up their business losses and debt (or personal losses and debt as well), to the point they'd go under anyway. This would just permanently displace even more workers into the ranks of the unemployed, and remove even more goods and services such now closed companies would have otherwise been providing to the marketplace.
Those PPP loans gave many, many business owners that cushion and safety net they needed to keep things going. And that was vital to help keep the economy going.
And those extra dollars weren't all spent on Porsches and baseball cards. I would imagine a majority of such excess dollars going to pay down business debts, hiring additional workers, funding expansion and/improvements, covering costs related to more remote working and accessibility, and on and on. And some of it was probably put aside as well as savings for a rainy day, since we still haven't seen the end of the pandemic yet. Was how things done possibly inefficient, hell yeah! What would you expect when everyone was running around like chickens with their heads cut off as the pandemic was raging? But when is our government ever really efficient? It's a "bureaucracy", which I've always thought of as a synonym for "wasteful". LOL Again, at least our government did something that likely needed to be done.