I've been really surprised that this hasn't been a political issue. These loans were a good deal larger than the student loans that've been forgiven, and a dream come true to anyone who's ever made money from fraud.
I'm entirely unhappy about the whole PPP situation, but I think the reason why it's taken up less space in public debates is because ostensibly it was to compensate businesses for being forced to close. Student loans had no equivalent government mandate to have people take them on.
I would prefer the counterfactual where nobody was forced to close (any longer than maybe the first couple of weeks) and therefore nobody got helicopter money; but since that isn't what happened, the next best thing would be aggressive prosecution of fraud. One can dream.
PPP loans went to "job creators", always a favorite politically-protected class.
>it was to compensate businesses for being forced to close
More specifically, it was to "protect paychecks", to keep workers on the payroll who otherwise would have been let go. Sometimes, but not always, one of those workers was the business owner. In theory it was a pass-through benefit aimed at workers, but the employers not only had the loans forgiven, but also got a tax deduction for spending the government's money, and even sweeter in some cases, got increased tax basis in their business for the loan money they never repaid.
Before I hit the unpopular opinion part, yes, PPP and EIDL had a lot of fraudulent applications that were approved. That said, I'll share a little of what I learned because my company survived losing 85% of our revenue in 2020 because of EIDL and PPP. I and my other cofounders took huge pay cuts to get through 2020 and 2021, and without PPP we would have been out of business, and 12 employees would have lost their livelihoods.
> PPP loans went to "job creators", always a favorite politically-protected class.
Both PPP and EIDL were to businesses. Not to individuals.
PPP was not a loan program. It was a grant. EIDL was a loan, and that was the program that had forgiveness. Being awarded PPP money required that you disclose payroll data before, during and after, and if you failed to meet terms, it would be converted to a loan. EIDL worked differently, if you met forgiveness, a percentage of your loan would be forgiven (I seem to recall 60% being the cap, but I could be wrong). In PPP there were caps on the amount a business owner could claim for their own compensation as a worker in the business.
> got increased tax basis in their business for the loan money they never repaid.
PPP was not a loan, it was a grant to cover payroll and unavoidable (i.e. rent) expenses during the initial lockdown. The IRS initially wanted to tax that (and for small businesses, that is at the personal rate of the owner) grant amount, which would have blunted the effect of PPP by 25-30%. The Trump adminstration stepped in and told the IRS to stand down, and changed the rules to prevent that. The purpose of PPP was really to ensure that businesses did not shut down permanently. The fact is that most small business only have sufficient cash to handle about 90 days of payroll and rent. Keeping the businesses alive would enable a faster rebound, because there was a study that estimated it would take eight years to re-grow that sector if those businesses were forced to shut down.
What percentage of PPP loans went to businesses that negative revenue impacts due to covid? PPP program was poorly structured, forgiveness should have been based on revenue impacts to the company which can be easily measured by using previous tax payments.
We chose not take a PPP loan because our industry saw record growth during Covid and it wasn't morally right to take advantage of a program meant for struggling businesses. Our competitors received money even though they also had record revenue growth. We were punished for doing the right thing because that capital could been have been used to invest in the business.
> We were punished for doing the right thing because that capital could been have been used to invest in the business.
PPP had two goals: prevent business closures and layoffs, and stimulate the business economy (companies were cutting spending too). Yes, the capital could have been used to invest in the business, hire more people, etc, which all stimulate economic activity.
Right, caps on owner "compensation", but profits go directly to owner at end of year as a dividend. Or as sibling mentions, as an incremental investment in the business.
This was absolutely a lifesaver for some businesses (hospitality industry, small biz retail.) But for the other parts of the economy which kept working, it was absolutely free money.
> but profits go directly to owner at end of year as a dividend
That is not always the case. Sometimes there is no profit to pay a dividend with. In a bad year, like 2020, that is usually the case.
> But for the other parts of the economy which kept working, it was absolutely free money.
Maybe, but I really think the image presented in a lot of articles like this is PPP was just 100% fat cats getting an extra serving of caviar. It was estimated at the time PPP went into effect that we were at risk of losing 71% of the small business economy, and that it would take eight years for the sector to recover... which would have been devastating to GDP, taxes and so on. The truth is probably between 0 and 71%, and the recovery time could have been less. I suspect PPP will be studied in the future as a starting point for dealing with other massive natural disasters that disrupt the national economy.
giving away money to business owners is always OK by the lights of people in power, since business owners help make the people in power rich. giving money to loser normies who can't pay their student loans? what's in it for them?
This is a cute theory but in reality it's far more likely to be usual government malaise, laziness, and disregard for long term consequences than some organized secret push by millionaires with pull in the government.
Yeah, anyone who thinks wealthy people have any pull in the united states government and use it to make themselves more wealthy must be some crazy alt right conspiracy theorist. Probably a white nationalist too. We all know everyone in the government is just dumb and all the trillions of dollars they waste is just because they make mistakes in excel and stuff.
Sure, one should always ask "Cui bono?", but it's equally important to also examine the incentive structures at play which drive the leviathan that is the government. At its core, the trillions of dollars of wasteful spending happens because politicians are rewarded for spending money and punished for asking where that money comes from or how effective the spending actually was, many years later.
A good example is the Covid lockdowns that benefited the likes of Amazon or Home Depot at the expense of Main Street businesses. Cui bono? Certainly the wealthy class did. But did they collude and whisper into the ears of the halls of power in federal, state, and local levels (which all played roles in lockdowns) to make sure that people were forced to lock down harder and longer? No -- it's just the incentive structure. Politicians and bureaucrats had the choice between being rewarded for taking "decisive action" against the spread of the virus or pilloried for doing nothing, even if in hindsight it appears that we would have been better off doing nothing.
Stuff like this is precisely why conservatives argue for limited government and more delegation of powers to lower levels of government. It's much easier for a wealthy person to have pull on a single US senator to make themselves more wealthy, than for that same person to have pull on twenty different state senators, or five hundred different city councilors.
It’s always the simpler answer, and as you point out looking at the sum of potential incentives usually points to the simplest solution. That being incompetence and laziness, not a large organized campaign of corruption by the wealthy elite.
I highly doubt the people engaging in PPP/Covid fraud are the typical power players in gov. Those people steal money through much more legal means like gov grants and contracts that end up costing 4x and taking 2x longer.
PPP loans were always supposed to be forgiven from the beginning. Nobody would have taken the loans otherwise. It was not really a loan it was a payroll subsidy to keep the economy from collapsing.
Also, this was actually authorized by Congress and not declared by fiat in an enormous executive overreach.
If anything it's a good case of why "trickle down" economic policies don't work very well. Many businesses who got the loans still fired employees, the cost of each job saved was high.
Yeah, just write every human a cheque and let the businesses that are already teetering on bankruptcy without anyone willing to rescue them go bankrupt.
It's sort of interesting. Just the mental gamesmanship aspect of the entire thing.
There are people who will swear up and down that welfare is the root of all evil. That bootstrap pulling is necessary, that there's opportunity for everyone regardless of their situation, and that all you need is hard work and dedication to succeed in the US. They will wring their hands about the federal deficit and will howl about the size of the national debt. Just look at the student loan forgiveness issue.
But if you dangle a $6K per head loan in front of them, with no consequences whatsoever, every one of these same people will take and say "what did you expect me to do? I've got a business to run." Because for the vast majority of them, complaining about welfare was never about their taxes, or even considering the plight of the individuals who need the money.
It's about the thing that they complain the "woke" masses of doing.
It's virtue signaling. It was never about the money. It was about self-justification.
Is your point that people are hypocrites by complaining about welfare and turning around and taking welfare for themselves when it's offered with no strings attached? I suppose the hypocrisy is true, but it also doesn't come with a lot of weight. It'd be like pointing out that the people who post "no human being is illegal" signs on their lawns don't actually take in refugees or vagrants in their homes.
I don't know about welfare being the root of all evil, but there are valid discussions to be had on that topic from people arguing in good faith, and I think it's perfectly justified for someone to feel that their taxes are too high or that welfare benefits provide too much.
I don't like PPP forgiveness, but at least it was voted on by Congress. Also, student loan forgiveness is literally fueling the problem that it's trying to solve. It will increase the willingness to pay of people of college, so colleges will increase tuition. Unlike businesses that reinvest their money to expand, colleges reinvest their money to chase prestige, so they have no incentive to keep prices constant.
This is what people forget. The mills of the gods grind slowly, but they grind exceeding fine - the government will slowly gather data and eventually charge some of the most egregious examples of fraud.
Sadly, this usually is the people who tried a fraud for the first time instead of those who are experts at repeated frauds. Nobody follows the letter of the law like someone violating the spirit.
That just seems so unlikely. There were so many PPP loans (over 10 million forgiven). The government can't possibly go through even a small percentage of the fraudulent loans with enough rigor to build a compelling case of fraud. We'll be lucky if they reach 1000 cases of fraud.
I agree that they may hit a few thousands at most, and much of the "fraud" is unprovable (e.g., companies that would have survived without a PPP loan but got one anyway, etc).
Weren't the terms of the loan; Is your business being negatively affected by COVID? Will you maintain your payroll if you get this money? Under the lenient terms of the loan, I don't see many real business having to worry about fraud.
>AFAICT, there's nothing stopping the government from charging recipients with fraud even after the loan is forgiven.
Nothing except that peaky thing called political reality that tends to get in the way of every ham-fisted enforcement action that the pro-jackboot subset of any given democracy is calling for at any particular minute.
Remember back when they tried hiring more IRS agents? The left made memes about government turning the screws on the poors once again. The right made memes about shooting feds. It was very clear that few on either side of the isle supports that kind of stuff right now.
Political reality precludes making even a suggestion of doing that prior to November 9th or thereabouts. The PPP fraud is a dead bloated deer in the middle of the political road at 3pm on a Friday. And 2/2 employees of the animal control department are hoping the weekend guy can deal with it if the coyotes don't get to it first.
And frankly, I kind agree. It's water under the bridge at this point and while the fraud was predicted it did mostly get dumped into the economy as intended and there's no way to know we didn't avert a worse crisis by doing that, fraud and all.
When I was in college in DC during the financial crisis, friends and I were at a bar and some guy comes in and pays the whole bar's tabs. Shouted "TARP MONEY!" and leaves. Pretty sure that guy was doing some fraud, but he was nice enough to share so I guess that's something.
It's hard to make a program like that quick enough to be effective without allowing fraud so I get the free for all style distribution. But especially with programs like TARP/PPP where the recipients are generally _already wealthy_ and the payments are relatively large, I'd like to see some after-the-fact scrutiny where people who commit fraud are punished, otherwise it reinforces the impression that money buys impunity.
> But especially with programs like TARP/PPP where the recipients are generally _already wealthy_ and the payments are relatively large, I'd like to see some after-the-fact scrutiny where people who commit fraud are punished, otherwise it reinforces the impression that money buys impunity.
This is happening, it's just slow. For example [1].
t's hard to make a program like that quick enough to be effective without allowing fraud...
Wasn't that the reasoning behind structuring PPP as loans? Get the money out as a loan, then forgive/not-forgive later after the borrower submits paperwork proving the funds were used appropriately.
It appears that second phase isn't happening - the government is just forgiving everything.
I don't know if that was ever stated as the rationale, but many people inferred that it was.
It's a defensive inference, to defend our belief that authorities wouldn't attempt to solve a crisis by just transferring a trillion dollars from lower rungs on the economic latter directly to higher rungs on the ladder.
We want to believe that the distribution of wealth is caused by individual behavior, that every person deserves their station in life however opulent or impoverished. We want to ignore the systems of power and privilege that exploit the low to further enrich the high.
But PPP strips away even the veneer of fairness and lays bare the brutal mechanics of wealth distribution based on power instead of contribution or merit.
Perhaps the reason PPP was structured as loans instead of grants was to maintain that fig leaf of fairness, to allow us to continue to defend the indefensible.
Everything you're suggesting here is just standard left-wing political worldview wrapped in a narrative device of "we believe <the system works>, but really it doesn't".
Also, ignoring fraud, wouldn't the flow of capital for PPP be primarily to the lower rungs, not from them? The money was to keep paying hourly wage employees in factories and retail while the business was shut down, right?
Maybe I'm mistaken about how the program worked, but I thought it was essentially the government stepping in to provide funds for payroll.
>Also, ignoring fraud, wouldn't the flow of capital for PPP be primarily to the lower rungs, not from them? The money was to keep paying hourly wage employees in factories and retail while the business was shut down, right?
That's sort of the entire narrative here, though. In theory, you are correct. BUT - the "loans" being forgiven across the board is, essentially, removing the step where businesses prove that the money was used for what it was supposed to be used for. So, absent concrete proof, it is easy to speculate that this was just another wealth transfer to the top.
Will we ever know? Probably not. But it's one more thing to throw onto the outrage bonfire for every side. It gives the left something to talk about (look at the wealth transfer to the rich). It give the right something to talk about (look at this gross overspend by the government). It gives the middle something to talk about (look at how smart we are knowing that this would happen).
And it's all political theater.
These are my opinions.
Edit: that being said, look at the comments in this thread for literal arguments that are examples of every single point in that last paragraph.
That's a great example of the power of Orwellian naming. Only 25% of "Paycheck Protection" funds "trickled down" to workers, while 75% was hoarded by owners.
If the objective is to get cash into the pockets of workers, you can just give it to them directly, and they'll get 100% of it.
The only possible rationale for implementing a Rube Goldberg system like PPP is if you intend for the vast majority of the funds to get siphoned off by the wealthy long before it makes it down to workers.
> If the objective is to get cash into the pockets of workers, you can just give it to them directly, and they'll get 100% of it.
That objective was achieved by opening up the unemployment taps.
The objective of PPP was to prevent the destruction of half the businesses in the economy, which would have had knock-on-effects that would have taken years and decades to fully unravel.
Think of the bullwhip effect in supply chains that everyone's been bitching about for the past two years. Now, multiply it times ten, because half the participants in the economy collapsed, and their replacements have not gotten their shit together yet, and won't for another five years.
Businesses collapsing, and ~identical businesses re-opening next year destroys massive amounts of value. The value was in the human knowledge, connections, contracts, and relationships between them and their suppliers/customers. You lose all of that. PPP was a stop-gap measure to reduce the # of these losses.
I think you're thinking of this in a binary sense, like we can either pay the business owners and they will <maybe> pay their employees and then it will be forgiven OR we let those people lose their job and go on unemployment. Those aren't the only options, but even if they were, in the semi industry it was fairly common for the whole company I worked for to shut down for a week or two if the semi economy isn't cranking. We all went on unemployment or took vacation, and came back to our jobs when the company opened again.
But, unemployment isn't the only thing we can use, because it does have strings. We expect you to be looking for another job every week, and proving it. The social security system is setup to distribute money to every American with a social security number, in a far more streamlined system. There are also nice systems in place that limit the amount you get from social security in the case that you're earning more than a limit. I think social security being extended to all Americans, letting them stay "at" their job even if it was shut down, and setting a floor for income at this time which would make sure the business owners were also able to buy their basic essentials, but not Lamborghinis, would have been the right move. I understand this would require something to help businesses with rent while they were unable to operate. A national rent holiday to cover the emergency of the pandemic would be one idea, or bailing out the banks that were effected.
The way this was implemented isn't the only way it could be implemented is all I'm saying, lots of countries did it other ways, and they didn't collapse in on themselves at the end of covid. The PPP program is not the only solution to keeping workers connected to their jobs, but it sure did create a lot of opportunities for fraud. There are podcasts that took hundreds of thousands of dollars of PPP money. A podcast.
Sure, there are other solutions, and you've given examples of decent ones (rent holidays, mortgage jubilees, etc), and in a better world, we would have undertaken them.
We don't live in a better world, finance has a stranglehold on our politics, and PPP was a better alternative than no-PPP. There's much to criticise it, and I don't think it was the best among all possible options, but I do think it was vastly better than nothing (Or just paying people through UI, while their employers fold).
PPP payments are not "revenue" and they're not taxable income. Owners and shareholders can dividend this cash to themselves while still claiming operating losses.
An existing program through the SBA was used as it was the fastest way to get cash out the door. That program happened to be a loan program, so they were structured that way with an almost automatic forgiveness.
> the SBA was used as it was the fastest way to get cash out the door.
Many non-savvy small businesses missed out in part due to lack of accounting help and lack of banking relationships for the application papers.
If this was to keep employees working, then the fastest way would be to credit the employer payroll tax federal withholding back to the employer after the employer sent it to the Feds. That is an existing channel and would be based on verified employee pay withholding.
The could have even credited back more than the withholding (i.e enough to cover the wages). But not sure that would work: company might not have the cash flow to float the payroll, and perhaps it would have invited a different fraud?
There weren’t a lot of tools and time was short. Would be worth thinking through for next time though. And let’s hope there isnt a next time.
The problem of course is that the review process is an enormous problem and there just aren't that many people in charge of reviewing them. I think a lot of people who are tuned into grifting the government saw it as a huge opportunity.
It appears that we are heading into a recession as we speak.
What are law makers doing right now to prepare for the possible effects of this recession? What are we doing to predict which parts of the financial system will collapse? What are we doing to prepare if CO-VID mutates into a deadly strain? We've known for 30 years that the climate will change, have we done anything to prepare for the consequences of that?
Why must we always need to react and pass TARP or PPP within a week time-frame or the entire economy crumbles?
> We've known for 30 years that the climate will change
to your point, archaeologists have been scuba diving to sunken coastal Greek and Roman era cities all around Mediterranean coasts for decades too, sunken from sea level rising may meters over the last couple thousand years.
Just another interesting datapoint straight from National Geographic magazines as a kid, before politicians really grabbed hold of global warming.
That's not a "interesting datapoint" that's an unrelated anecdote.
That's the climate change denialism equivalent of "my grandma smoked her whole life and didn't get lung cancer, so these scientists don't know what they're talking about".
4. People that think climate change is real, and investments to mitigate damages should be weighed on a cost/benefit basis.
That is to say, for a given change, how much will it hurt people to mitigate it now vs later, given the time value of money and exponential development.
People in #1 and #2 dogmatically believe the answer always falls into act now or act later.
Luckily, most governments end up taking some sort of a middle road between these extremes.
Climate catastrophe is imminent, and governments dragging their feet are directly responsible. It is very far from clear that civilization collapse will be averted.
No, because almost everything that could be done about averting climate catastrophe would be massively good for the economy and global prosperity, immediately. It could be uncomfortable for owners of coal mines and oil supply chain companies.
You telegraph your sympathies.
Global civilization collapse followed by billions starving and thermonuclear war will not end up good for anybody. But with some luck you could die first, something foot-draggers seem to count on. Why should they risk any hint of (expected) discomfort for benefits they would not anyway live to see? What have their grandchildren ever done for them?
>>because almost everything that could be done about averting climate catastrophe would be massively good for the economy and global prosperity, immediately
ROFL.... nothing is further from the truth, the cost of "green" energy is massively regressive for people in "rich" nations like the US. Hell just the cost of replacing gas cars with EV's would be HUGE on most people, and EV can not replace every type of vehicle (see people that have to tow anything)
That is not getting into the huge problem for norther climates where sure Heat pumps have come a long way but still are not as good as a NatGas for extreme cold climate
There are countless other technological problems that will make daily expenses of people massively more costly than they are with traditional energy.
You seem unaware of the huge tax you pay for continued access to petroleum. To a large degree, most of military expense is to maintain that access.
Energy from renewables will be vastly cheaper than humanity has ever experienced since the forests were wiped out, and will fuel a golden age. Provided, of course, that civilization does not collapse first, as you seem to say you would prefer.
You keep claiming that the GP would prefer civilization to collapse. Nothing in their writing suggests that, and your only proof is that they disagree with your assertion that a climate catastrophe is imminent and can only be averted by radical means. Again, that puts you in their category 1.
> Energy from renewables will be vastly cheaper than humanity has ever experienced
Handwaving "will be" is not good enough for policy.
You have evidently not seen the cost curves of renewable energy sources. They have declined through many orders of magnitude, with no end in sight, similarly to transistors following Moore's Law. "Will be" is exactly what policy needs to be based on. Policy based on "what was" is policy failure.
You are very confused about this "category 1". Literally nobody advocates for any measure that would interfere with economic prosperity. Action preventing climate catastrophe and collapse of civilization would discomfit only those heavily bought into the petroleum economy.
In one hand you see no end in sight of continued technological advances that have heretofore led to decreasing unit costs in renewable energy, yet on the other hand you see imminent collapse of civilization? Are the two hands joined to the same person?
If all-in renewable energy costs including storage do in fact continue to decline at the rate you imply it will, then it looks like we won't have to do anything special to bring about the end of fossil fuels. Prices will do that automatically.
> Literally nobody advocates for any measure that would interfere with economic prosperity
Most every proposed solution I've seen to the imminent climate catastrophe involves making it more expensive to maintain current living standards, maybe with a side order of claiming current living standards are immoral. What are these measures that make substantial headway against climate change without making people poorer?
> those heavily bought into the petroleum economy
You don't have to own stock in Exxon and Shell to be "bought in" to the petroleum economy. The global economy is the petroleum economy, because in the aggregate every problem facing humanity is an energy problem. I don't think many people particularly care where their energy comes from, as long as it comes to them cheaply and reliably, and so far fossil fuels have other sources beat.
I'm not invested either emotionally or financially in seeing the continued success of fossil fuels; I'm invested in maintaining high living standards for myself and raising the living standards of the global poor. I remain skeptical that climate change will collapse civilization anytime soon.
> "...every proposed solution I've seen to the imminent climate catastrophe involves making it more expensive to maintain current living standards..."
False. Every solution involves producing energy radically more cheaply than any ever before, with no chokehold by any gatekeeper. I can see why this would be unattractive to you, if it might interfere with personally raising your own standard of living relative to your neighbors.
It is a complete folly to believe that US Military spending would be reduced in the absence of petrol, in fact I fully expect the world to destabilize more as we move away from petrol which will necessitate the need for increased military expenditures
Further outside of Nuclear, energy from renewables is not cheaper not even close, and they have the unfortunate side effect of being non-predictable and subject to nature which petrol and nuclear do not. Wind and Solar are the worst and most expensive at this but as we have seen recently extreme drought may impact Hydro as well.
So we go back to the 3 Categories of person, I believe renewables need more time for innovation and are probably about 20+ years out needing not only more advancement on the production side but also needing some massive innovation on energy storage systems in order to effectively replace petrol, and artificially advancing that time table via government fiat will destabilize the world faster and worse than climate change, especially we do in the moronic way governments are today with things like Fertilizer bans, Gas Car bans, and other mandates that ban the use of some products / services
In the same way I oppose the government prohibition of drugs, I oppose the government prohibiting farmers from using fertilizer, and I oppose the government prohibiting people from buying gas cars
Government prohibition like that rarely work and often produce all kinds of unintended negative consequences
Number 1 is a strawman, written to paint people as extremists.
Number 2 is naive and glib. Of course "humanity will adapt", but that adaptation will be in the form of horrific suffering for billions and lower quality of life for everyone in the future.
That we should be treating climate crisis with the urgency and severity that it warrants and taking immediate action.
Create a flat carbon tax to make all products and transportation reflect their true cost rather than letting people profit by poisoning the commons. Remove the artificial barriers to nuclear that make it cost prohibitive to start a new plant. Allocate more resources to re-training fossil fuel industry laborers into new careers. Allocate more resources into finding technology to make lower carbon cement, steel and fertilizer.
We don't need to radically alter the existing economy or society. We need to make some minor tweaks so align economic incentives, stop letting people freeload off of polluting activities and allocate tax dollars to programs that are more beneficial.
I agree with many of your points, and absolutely with the point that we should align economic incentives. I further suggest that instead of allocating tax dollars to such research programs, we just cut those taxes. If economic incentives are properly aligned, then there will be plenty of profit motive for private efforts to research lower carbon cement and whatnot.
Unless you think that we can have a second Manhattan Project and dedicate half a percent of GDP to that end and get something usable on the other side ;-)
Number 2 is the only realistic plan, and all other plans I have seen simply moves up the "horrific suffering for billions" and/or "lower quality of life for everyone" in a "rich" nation (and often further limited to the US being the only nation that needs to pay)
Not at all! The collapse of the Sri Lankan agricultural sector shows that plenty of people in poorer countries will also suffer in the pursuit of climate idealism.
Where is the reasonable methods to stop climate change. Things like limits on carbon emissions and coal power plants. Or is anything that costs anyone a single dollar "resetting the global economy"
The sunken urban areas explored lately are mostly subsidence, e.g. Heraklion off Egypt.
That said, there is a great deal of underwater urban stuff off India not accounted for by subsidence. And a million square miles off southeast Asia still unexplored, that might or might not be urban. That would be any from before 8kya.
A recession hasn't been declared yet (though may be in the future, retroactively including parts of this year). Laypersons often define it as 2 quarters of negative GDP growth, which has happened, but that is not the official definition in the US. The actual definition is more complex, and includes things like unemployment levels, which are at generational lows.
This argument always goes the same way, yet for some reason I don't think I've seen it all the way to the end. Let supply the next part:
The notion of an "official" definition, and that it must be "declared" were introduced when the prior definition indicated a recession and the powers that be either did not want to admit there was one, or did not think this one should really qualify.
This argument over the binary question of whether we are, or not, in a recession is so strange.
If we are, it's the strangest recession I've ever encountered, with sky-high, record levels of job openings, rising wages, lots of robust job growth, expanding manufacturing, rising prices, product shortages, etc.
There are a lot of headwinds, and the business cycle indeed seems to have turned down. Based on rising rates, reduced credit, and an increasing trend of layoffs, I bet we are indeed heading into a recession.
TARP is nothing like PPP though; the vast majority of TARP bailout money was basically in the form of asset purchases (equity stakes in banks, finance firms and insurance companies), loan guarantees and finally outright loans to large companies in the auto-industry.
Although there was an expectation that some of the asset purchases might turn out to be valueless, or that loans not be repaid; there was no concept of loan-forgiveness baked into the bailout. Indeed, basically of the TARP money was repaid in full.
PPP's definition of success, on the other hand, was that jobs would be preserved, resulting in the forgiveness of the loans.
> Indeed, basically of the TARP money was repaid in full.
Sorta. If you invested money at the bottom of the market in late 08/early 2009 and only broke even several years later, you must have set half the money on fire (edit: or embezzled it).
TARP required the banks involved to issue preferred stock for purchase by the Treasury; this prices more like bonds than equities due to the fixed dividend.
Did they pay like $10 or less on each $25 par value or something? Or did they buy at par at like a 10-12% or so rate and duh, the banks redeemed them for par?
Still sounds like gov took the downside risk while shielding themselves from the upside.
Actually it's a bit more complicated, because the preferred stock was also issued with 10 year warrants to buy common stock with an exercise price based on the company stock at the time of issuance. The warrants could be repurchased at fair market value, or they would end up being auctioned by the Treasury.
So the Treasury did also have upside participation. e.g. Morgan Stanley repurchased its warrants for $950M vs. its $10B preferred stock sale.
The preferred stock also came with all kinds of covenants that related to government policy objectives (capping of common stock dividends, initial limitations on redemption absent a successful raising of equity, executive compensation restrictions) which really frustrate the notion of "pricing" this.
The point still remains; the premise of TARP was "the only way the government loses the entire pot is if the program fails disastrously and the entire financial sector fails" whereas the premise of PPP was "the desired outcome is that all the loans are forgiven and the government loses the whole pot".
I didn't mean to over-imply the similarities. I was mostly pointing out that large scale interventions rightfully sacrifice oversight for speed/impact, but that it'd be nice to see more after the fact accountability.
> t especially with programs like TARP/PPP where the recipients are generally _already wealthy_ and the payments are relatively large, I'd like to see some after-the-fact scrutiny
Or, here me out, we stop giving rich people money regardless. I can see a program that protects businesses in 2020 since they were shut down, but think we could have had a better program than the PPP. I don't understand why we didn't just let companies in 2008 go bankrupt. Can someone explain it to me?
2008 was essentially a liquidity crisis not a solvency crisis. Think of it as a bank run on things that looked like banks but didn’t have deposit insurance (hence all the talk afterwards about ‘shadow banks’)
Once you understand what was happening the solution of first solving the liquidity crisis (by having the government front the liquidity; note that all of the banks paid back the TARP money), and then instituting strict capitalization regulations on banks (ie Dodd-Frank and Basel II which hurt their profits by reducing risk) to avoid the same thing happening again and remove some of the moral hazard is a perfectly reasonable policy response.
But the issue with bank runs is that little old ladies lost their life savings. Who cares if hedge funds lost their money because of a run in the bank.
Besides, it seemed from the outside to very much be a solvency/asset price issue. Mortgages were being defaulted on, money was owed. If GS or AIG went out of business and ended up being a subsidiary of Burry's fund, who does that hurt. GS's customers have their money/shares GS manages sequestered so it's not like Main Street would lose their portfolios (although they would have to write down the value)
I’m saying that the fact that the banks all paid back their TARP money in full with interest and those banks still exist today is a signal that it was not fundamentally a solvency crisis.
There will be many technocratic explanations, but in the end it'll just be like land management policy which prevented small-scale natural wildfires from burning year after year and eventually ended up in a conflagration.
Was it a mistake to drop interest rates to 0 and give out free money to business owners during a pandemic? I think monetary and fiscal policy overreacted to the pandemic, but we'll never hear from anyone in power that it was a mistake. I don't think our government leaders have learned anything.
It was a massive over reaction and a massive mistake. Inflation now is a direct consequence of indiscriminate spending. Politicians do not seem to understand basic economics. E.g. California's inflation relief checks going out right now.
This is correct in hindsight. At the time, a lot of smart people were forecasting economic armageddon. Businesses screwed up too; big, well financed companies like Airbnb did massive layoffs. My superhost acquaintance went on to have her best year ever.
None of this excuses the lack of oversight, but the initial overreaction may have been rational.
When you have a systemic shock with unknown impact, rational can still be ultimately wrong.
If there’s a 50% chance of total economic meltdown, and you can avert it with a few years of high inflation, that might still be the correct decision, even if the doomsday scenario doesn’t come true.
California isn’t printing money for these checks like the federal government did. It is all coming from the budget surplus, and is not going to have a meaningful effect on inflation.
Not true. If California were to use the surplus to retire debt, it would reduce inflationary forces in the economy. By distributing the money back out, the State of California will contribute to inflation.
> I don't think our government leaders have learned anything.
The next group of politicians will have "learned" from this - in the sense that people will have voted them in based on whatever random views they had that matched with how the will of the people has changed.
I doubt existing politicians ever learn anything. Especially when our politicians pride themselves on "not flipping" on views. How are you supposed to learn anything if you never change your mind?
We don't elect people who learn. We elect people who we think are always right (charlatans).
I skeptical the people we elect in next will have any better ideas, because I don't think "we" learned anything from this either.
Fraud aside, which is a problem, the "forgiveness" of the loans was the plan all along so it's not as if businesses were expected to pay them back.
The program was really a bailout so businesses could maintain their payrolls when everything was shutdown. Instead of writing the checks directly, the government decided to frame it as a loan that would be forgiven if businesses stayed in business and spent it on their payrolls. This was a good strategy for the government, because it would have been pretty tough to enforce otherwise.
So the loan forgiveness was by _design_ and the point of the program was to keep businesses alive when the governments themselves were (for perhaps good reason) making it impossible for them to operate. It's not really "forgiveness" in the sense of, say, the college loan forgiveness program.
You kept people employed and on their employers insurance, benefits, etc. You let businesses try to remain as operational as possible during the shut down.
The alternative was going to be mass layoffs, unemployment and medicaid/aca applications.
The people who keep harping on PPP seem to forget everything else that was done in the same time period.
There’s a difference between people complaining about PPP as a concept (which I don’t think many are?) and complaining about PPP abuse, funds being given to companies that were not impacted by shut downs, straight up fraud, and people taking PPP money and buying lambos.
From what I have gathered, 1.06 million Americans have died from Covid. Are you implying that more people should have been sacrificed to keep businesses profiting?
The CDC reports that more than 70% of the population has had COVID. Multiple studies have also reported that 40% of COVID cases are asymptomatic. A high percentage of the population has been infected. There is zero evidence that shutting down businesses did anything to prevent infections or reduce deaths. At best "closing the economy" delayed infection.
> So the loan forgiveness was by _design_ and the point of the program was to keep businesses alive when the governments themselves were (for perhaps good reason) making it impossible for them to operate. It's not really "forgiveness" in the sense of, say, the college loan forgiveness program.
I think this is a key point.
The PPP "loans" effectively became a payout to mitigate the chance & success of businesses suing the government en mass for the shutdown orders.
When you sue an entity civilly, you have to show damages. The PPP "loans" countered those damages (and often more) which means the threshold for a successful lawsuit just got WAY higher.
It's also interesting that politicians want to means-check every penny that goes to the general public, including the stimulus and debt forgiveness but also welfare, food stamps, medicaid, and so on. It's imperative that nobody is taking advantage of the system! But when it comes to PPP and other handouts to corporations, suddenly they have no way to means-check or figure out in some other way whether the recipient actually needs it.
Interestingly this is missing an important piece of context that led to PPP in the first place: A novel worldwide pandemic that was/is killing a lot of people and forced businesses to close — causing an immediate and brutal financial emergency for small businesses in particular.
Small businesses account for roughly 60% of all jobs in the U.S.
Yes, adding processes to reduce fraud would've been helpful in reducing waste, but how do you suppose that should've happened? What kind of infrastructure do we have to means test that many businesses? Could it have happened within a typical pay period or two? How were workers/businesses supposed to eat and pay bills until then?
It is interesting how stimulus checks and PPP aren't treated the same way. However, debt forgiveness is not the same. The government did not compel students into debt. They did compel businesses to close and people to lose their income.
Getting forgiveness on loans that you chose to take for a school you couldn't afford otherwise is different than getting money from the government after local governments forcibly shut your business down.
Anecdotally (of course) of the handful of business owners that I know (personally) who received PPP funds, 75% of them didn't need the loan and all of them had their loans forgiven. Some of these businesses had their best years ever (revenue).
There was probably a lot of "I'm going to get mine" attitude, but I also suspect many took the loans in anticipation of needing them. Remember, very smart people said the economy was going to get destroyed so it would be prudent for businesses to prepare. If you didn't need the loan, but were told to prepare for the worst, why wouldn't you get the loan?
Same. Someone I know claimed he/the owners received $5 million for a single restaurant location over the pandemic. The owners didn't "need it" unless you count not being less wealthy by pumping in their own money a need.
But hey, that's the system and they chose to play it. Maybe a requirement to post on the physical business how much pandemic money they've got would be an easy middle ground.
I'm glad he told me though so I can I understand what really keeps businesses going.
Anecdotally of the handful of business owners that I know personally who received PPP funds (3 businesses total), all needed the loan, used it to maintain payroll, and all of them had their loans forgiven.
Since we're sharing anecdotes, anecdotally, the only business owner I know personally who received PPP funds (My wife's employer) needed the loan, kept everyone on the payroll, paying them to do nothing, until PPP funds ran out, and once that happened, laid off half the staff.
He then continued running the business at a loss, paying out of his own pocket for the next year and only now has returned to something resembling profitability.
Why was the business operating at a loss? Because of the social changes brought about by COVID, it took over a year after the mandates were lifted for his customers to return to the status quo.
> He then continued running the business at a loss, paying out of his own pocket for the next year
The year-by-year outlook of profit vs loss is arbitrary.
How did the decade by decade history look? Any losses?
Why not look at businesses second by second? Sometimes you’ll lose in 1 second what will take thousands of seconds in profit to make up.
Largely corps distribute their profits to protect past earnings against future losses, but risk short-term insolvency which should be at their own risk.
Likely they funded the ongoing survival of business because walking away from its equity value would have resulted in greater losses.
You're both right. I know of 10 cases in my social circle.
Two were small tech companies (not startups) that pivoted to WFH services in 2020, had their best years ever, and then returned to their normal work portfolio in 2022. Good years.
Five were restaurants I frequent. Two of those went out of business, two used PPP to pay salaries then laid folks off, and one had a fantastic year because they already had eds+meds+tech clientelle, were in a fairly good pandemic-weathering of the city (lots of SFHs and huge parks), and executed extremely well on the "delivery but we'll keep the social third place vibe going with various virtual events" model.
One is a auto dealership (well, a manager at an auto dealership). Basically used the PPP to pay salespeople salaries for a few months and by the time the first summer came around it was back to business as usual.
The rest were various other small businesses for whom PPP was basically purely supplemental income.
The only one I'm really sour about is a tradesman who did a bunch of under the table cash work (unreported so a 30% boost already) + got PPP + got enhanced unemployment. Almost two straight years of tax fraud. Bought a $300K boat and bunch of other toys this year.
As someone whose own consultancy provides services to a couple dozen of these small businesses, primarily ones which happened to fall under the rubric of "essential services", I noted that nearly all of them received outsize PPP awards (on the order of half a million and up for 30-ish person companies, which had no shortage of income due to being among the aforementioned essential businesses). These were almost immediately forgiven.
In most cases the businesses were able to apply twice and get two separate awards. I'm not sure what the mechanism was for this as our business itself never applied for these loans.
In the aftermath of all of this there has been a distinct pattern emerging in which these small business owners have developed a kind of amnesia about the money they've received from these loans and have assigned the upward balance sheet inflection to their own "hard work" commitment and demonstrated acumen in negotiating the covid crisis.
I suppose this isn't exactly untrue, but there is no internalized recognition that this success was a one-time phenomenon due to a one-time windfall from the government.
Another anecdote somewhat unrelated is that the number of family-run (i.e. father and son/s) trades businesses in my local suburb all seem to have decided they need brand new work trucks at the same time. These vehicles are uniformly the upper end luxury trim levels of the line, lifted and stanced to absurdly aggressive proportions, and show no signs of being put to any of the actual work for which they would be utterly impractical anyway. The number of rear window stickers with Sparta helmets or some sort of depiction of an automatic weapon suggests the PPP loans may end up having inadvertently helped equip and arm a future informal militia.
The PPP was an upward wealth distribution. It might look like a technocratic accident, but things always, always, always shake out this way.
On a similar note, the ~$2000 of assistance most Americans got went straight to landlords. This crisis was fully exploited by people who knew exactly what they were doing.
I'm in PE and have looked at probably 500 deals this year. All received PPP, and in virtually all cases it has dropped straight to the bottom line as a dividend to the owner. (I don't do any restaurant / hospitality businesses, and focus on businesses that would have been open in pandemic.)
Biggest wealth transfer to owners of small(ish) businesses ever!!!
My uncle's business got a half million dollar PPP loan with millions in profits and over 15 million in the bank. It was distributed as employee bonuses. You wonder why there's inflation.
This article is really misleading. The study they cite says:
>Overall, we find 1.41 million questionable loans representing $64.2 billion in capital with
our primarƒy measures. These measures inevitably contain some false positives, which would
lead to overstatements, and some flagged loans may have been legitimately eligible for smaller
loans. However, the measures also miss many forms of suspicious lending, and sensitivity
analysis indicates this total is likely substantially understated. Slightly lowering the threshold
on the high implied compensation and considering excess loans in industry-county pairs
beyond the number of establishments reported by the U.S. Census results in a total suspicious
lending estimate of $117.3 billion.
So 64.2 or 117.3 out of 800 billion is suspicious at some level. That doesn't mean the entire value of those loans is fraud. Just that they were goosed to increase payout. So anywhere from a few percent to 15 percent. Which for how large and how fast is actually pretty darn good.
The real scandal here is that it was an ill-conceived program. The political powers at the time acted like we'd lock down for a few weeks and then everything would go back to normal. But that was pretty obviously not going to happen. Ultimately PPP had a marginal effect on what businesses survived. Most of the ones that did would have anyways. PPP was just money directly into those owners' pocket.
Even worse, lots of businesses went gang busters during Covid. So most of this PPP money went to the winners of the Covid economy instead of the losers. It was just one gigantic blunder.
We hit over 1 million dead after flattening the curve, effective treatments, and a huge swath of the most vulnerable population getting vaccinated before infection.
Models showing 4% IFRs without drastic measures like lockdowns seem fairly accurate to me. Simply letting COVID run rampant may have done less economic damage because it’s vastly less deadly to working age populations, but we would have barbarically sacrificed a significant chunk of the population for little gain.
> Models showing 4% IFRs without drastic measures like lockdowns seem fairly accurate to me.
The infection fatality rate is: deaths / anybody who is infected. Everybody is gonna get Covid, mitigations or not, so the denominator is always going to be the same. IFR is independent of mitigations.
The only way the IFR might change is if healthcare systems got so overrun that they could no longer give care. This did not happen anywhere in the industrialized world. In fact all of the temporary field hospitals here in the states were closed virtually.
The models showing a 4% IFR were pure fantasy. The IFR for a healthy human under like 65 is something less than %0.1. If you are a kid, your risks are lower than dying in a house fire.
You can’t argue about a zero social distancing world based on data from countries that implemented social distancing. Doing nothing means seeing what IFR rakes look like without a healthcare system.
Even with all the existing measures, many areas ran out of ICU beds. All those deferred surgeries had an actual cost in human lives because you can’t simply delay cancer treatment without issue. I will say it again, some people with cancer died because of the COVID pandemic even without getting infected.
Anything less than what we did would have further overburdened the healthcare system. Doing absolutely nothing and even less serious cases that responded to such basic measures as IV fluids would have killed people without a functioning healthcare system.
> You can’t argue about a zero social distancing world based on data from countries that implemented social distancing.
You can very easily argue that the mitigations we put in place were based on the theory that Covid only had a droplet based spread, like the flu. The problem is that Covid is fully airborne, like measles, so the mitigations we put into place were ineffective.
Social distancing is a good example:
A person infected with a virus that has a droplet based spread will spray out droplets when they cough or sneeze and those droplets will fall to the ground within six feet of their emission.
An airborne virus is emitted by people even when they are just breathing normally, and can stay suspended in the air for hours. An airborne virus will spread throughout an enclosed space.
Your argument falls apart when you consider closing down movie theaters and schools stops both. The initial version of COVID was airborne but didn’t spread that fast compared to say measles so it didn’t take much to bring transmission below replacement rate in most areas.
More recent versions are more easily transmissible but are dealing with higher levels of immunity due to vaccination and prior exposure. When modeling such repeated outbreaks people who where at the highest risk for transmission due to coming into contact with others regularly where also the first to gain immunity from less easily transmissible strains.
Your argument falls apart when you remember that the mitigations we put into place were highly effective against the Flu, which does have a droplet based spread, but were completely ineffective at stopping the spread of Covid, which continued to spread like wildfire.
>CDC says seasonal flu cases hit record lows around the world
Being effective for the flu doesn’t prevent them from being less effective but still critical for COVID.
Multiple COVID trackers shows a response to COVID mitigation strategies and their removal well outside of seasonal trends. Demonstrating unsurprisingly that transmission goes down when people spend less time around each other.
The science shows mitigation strategies worked, though they didn’t all work equally well. Here’s one literature review:
“Public health interventions and non-pharmaceutical measurements were effective in decreasing the transmission of COVID-19. The included studies showed that travel restrictions, borders measures, quarantine of travellers arriving from affected countries, city lockdown, restrictions of mass gathering, isolation and quarantine of confirmed cases and close contacts, social distancing measures, compulsory mask wearing, contact tracing and testing, school closures and personal protective equipment use among health workers were effective in mitigating the spread of COVID-19.” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8164261/
As to standing six feet apart. It’s true that COVID didn’t need droplets, but it could still make use of them. There is a concept of viral load during transmission because the human immune system is much more effective stopping a single virus from infection someone than 10,000 of them. Non specific immune responses don’t provide lasting immunity but they do prevent the vast majority of infection that cross surface barriers from having a noticeable impact.
Sorry, but I don't find information published before the WHO finally admitted that Covid was airborne to be all that convincing.
>As 2021 drew to a close, the highly contagious Omicron variant of the pandemic virus was racing around the globe, forcing governments to take drastic actions once again. The Netherlands ordered most businesses to close on 19 December, Ireland set curfews and many countries imposed travel bans in the hope of taming the tsunami of COVID-19 cases filling hospitals. Amid the wave of desperate news around the year-end holidays, one group of researchers hailed a development that had seemed as though it might never arrive. On 23 December, the World Health Organization (WHO) uttered the one word it had previously seemed incapable of applying to the virus SARS-CoV-2: ‘airborne’.
Social distancing by six feet cannot by definition be effective against a virus that floats in the air for hours and completely spreads through any enclosed space.
Again if you follow the science being airborne doesn’t prevent other methods of transmission. People also got COVID from sharing needles, which doesn’t mean needle exchanges would have been particularly effective but they would have stopped a tiny fraction of cases.
Transmission isn’t like computer virus which can only be spread via one specific method. Close content does increase the risk of transmission from a simple density function if nothing else.
> Again if you follow the science being airborne doesn’t prevent other methods of transmission.
No, if you follow the science you won't claim that social distancing can be effective against a virus that isn't limited to only spreading six feet before falling to the ground.
Reducing transmission is useful even if you don’t stop 100% of it.
There are exponential returns on each case blocked because that cases doesn’t result in new cases. If the virus is still spreading exponentially then it’s simply delaying cases, but 1.01^X is monumentally different than 0.99^X even though you blocked 2% of transmissions.
Saying standing six feet apart only blocks X% of cases is therefore irrelevant on it’s own, it’s only relevant in the context of overall transmission.
In the end simply delaying COVID until after vaccination has saved over 1 million American lives. We could have done more, but we could also have done vastly less.
PS: I linked mounds actual peer reviewed science you have ignored so it’s clear this is just wasting time. But I home other people reading this thread may come to rational conclusions.
I don't think people are going to come to the conclusion you want. I thought I understood your position at the start but by the end I am just scratching my head here. You seem to admit covid is airborne yet at the same time are adamant 6 feet of social distancing stops covid and prevents countries from having a 4% IFR. Yet South Korea doesn't seem to have gone past a 2.5% IFR and wiki seems to imply they did not lock down and Italy was one of the first to lockdown and had the highest IFR? Wouldn't this actual data invalidate your claim without lockdowns IFR would be 4%?
Wouldn't is just be easer to admit your wrong and that 6 feet social distancing does not stop covid. You were originally told incorrect information by, well everyone, and now that you know covid is airborne the 6 feet was worthless.
No, I never said any individual measure was critical on it’s own. Six feet alone as in without masks etc does almost nothing. Six feet in combination with many other measures can do quite a lot near a tipping point.
Shutting down schools was was huge, but you seem to want to talk about 6 feet like that’s the only thing that happened.
What masks and 6 feet separation had going for them which is easy to forget is how cheap they are. Closing schools is going to have knock on effects for decades, people standing further apart is practically free by comparison.
Okay thank you that makes more sense. But from an outsider reading the conversation as is, that is not very clear at all.
Do you have any proof that shutting down schools was huge? Everything I have seen says the exact opposite. Little to no benefit with massive decades long consequences.
You said originally you feel that lockdowns worked but again the actual world data does not agree with you. I listed two countries that as examples in my previous comment.
Here is a very comprehensive report on the lockdowns that looks at mortalities as well as economic impacts in the states:
That’s a long way from a comprehensive report, it’s not even a peer reviewed paper and has serious flaws. It aggregates things at the state level and condenses it all to a single datapoint which throws away mounds of useful data. Not just that but excludes state level data that doesn’t fit it’s conclusion and ignores cofounders like population density and feedback loops from low rates of transmission reducing the need for lockdowns. I don’t mean mean this as an attack but read up on the backgrounds of the authors they all have political backgrounds. It’s an odd collaboration, I how it came about.
Here’s a vastly more rigorous study: The differences between weights estimated by common and individualized models, although present, do not lead to drastically different conclusions—indeed, both models indicate that school closing has a large impact on virus transmissionhttps://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-21126-2
You keep linking this study likes it proves your point but it does not. It has similar issues to the ones you listed above. It ignores things like repeat infections, feedback loops, and population structure. Using the same logic your study is serious flawed.
Also all the authors of your study seem to have an agenda of being pro lockdowns and push that.
You absolutely meant it as an attack. In fact the FIRST time I commented in a thread about 6 feet of social distancing, you jumped at me about how I only want to talk about 6 feet of social distancing. If I wanted to talk about the other stuff I probably would have commented somewhere else.
I don’t actually mind that the authors you linked have an agenda, their arguments are independent of themselves. I just thought the entire things was odd compared to any of the actually peer reviewed studies I had seen on the subject.
If I wanted to attack the paper I would have pointed out their anti school lockdown examples actually locked down schools thus invalidating their argument. It’s an argument that state governments could have opened schools and restaurants more frequently, not that closing them was never useful.
There are hundreds of peer review studies you can chose from and the vast majority show closing schools was useful. The better ones point out that they could have been open sooner in most areas as long as they where willing to close them should cases rise.
It’s gonna take decades before we can judge if any of these mitigations did a single thing. The fact it is even debatable says the effect they had was negligible at best; definitely not worth their cost to society. If it was worth it, it shouldn’t require fancy research to prove, it should be completely obvious and enormous.
The fact we had plans zero clue if this stuff would work at all is reason enough to not do it. We subjected billions of people to a uncontrolled experiment. Worse it was without consent.
It’s easy to see that they collectively did quite a bit, that study I linked has a lot of research behind it but even very simplistic models still show huge collective benefits.
The hard part is assessing the cost and benefit of each of them individually.
> The only way the IFR might change is if healthcare systems got so overrun that they could no longer give care. This did not happen anywhere in the industrialized world. In fact all of the temporary field hospitals here in the states were closed virtually.
Are you sure, especially particularly early & also this late? My understanding is that several crucial treatments were mass-deferred, several places had no beds, the dead were literally stacked on trucks, and the medical system has been utterly destroyed either from staff falling ill or getting so emotionally destroyed that they've quit. Wasn't there a mainstream situation a bit ago where a nurse literally had to call the fire department because of lack of medical staff?
My understanding is that hospitals still haven't recovered in terms of staffing.
Yes, the person you’re replying to is clueless. Even with all of the lockdowns, distancing, masking, and tons of other interventions - hospitals all over were on the brink of collapse. I have 3 immediate family members who are hospitalists in the US and each of their hospitals was in extremely dire straits. 100% bed occupancy, no non-emergent surgeries, diverting patients to neighboring states.
That’s talking about a recent snapshot not what things where like at the peak of the pandemic. In 2022 hospitals are as it says getting back to patients who’s treatment where deferred during earlier peaks.
> The only way the IFR might change is if healthcare systems got so overrun that they could no longer give care. This did not happen anywhere in the industrialized world.
What world do you live in? It certainly isn't mine. One of my co-workers passed away in her home after being turned away from the ER in part due to no hospitals in the area having available ventilators.
My worry is that we've displaced the casualties to a far less visible causal agent. There's a lot of economic variables that have been pulled at every level, from the individual to the state, to global concerns. And I think these are more pernicious and difficult to track than would be a disease, but I do expect the impact to, overall, be more severe that it otherwise would've been without the (perhaps naive) interventionism. That's just a hypothesis.
If you compare CA vs FL, FL only has a 10% higher age adjusted population mortality rate from covid. This indicates that some the strictest covid measures in the US made little difference vs the laxest. You can point to other countries if you want, and you would be right, but the type of strict measures that China used to stop the virus are not remotely politically possible in the US (and thank god they aren't).
The US healthcare system moved resources around to respond to more critical areas. As such things are less independent than you are suggesting.
That said, look at the worst states on that list and you will notice a trend. Mississippi, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Kentucky, Alabama aren’t the states with extremely high density cities like NYC with the highest natural transmission rates, they are the states that failed.
It's definitely a trend that states with higher rates of obesity and hypertension have higher death rates. But since those are known comorbidities, not particularly surprising.
Mississippi and WV had obesity rates of 39.5% in 2018, yet Mississippi was 476 where WV was 364 so something else is going on.
Especially when you consider Delaware’s 33.5% obesity in 2018 somehow only resulted in 289. Turns out states with stronger responses had better results independent of what population density and demographics would suggest.
I definitely don't think that's the only factor and the correlation isn't 1:1 so you can't necessarily cherry pick 3 states and say the trend doesn't exist (but if you do want to cherry pick states, I'd point out that of the states that took a laxer approach to covid, Utah has the lowest obesity rate. They also have a much lower population-adjusted death rate than states like California that took more aggressive measures to flatten the curve over 1-2 years)
I'm not convinced that density is a major factor in covid mortality as outdoor transmission is minimal, and the virus was able to spread effectively throughout the population even in low density areas. (I could be convinced by good data, but I haven't seen any on this)
Also density measurement is hard. Does Utah count as "dense?" If you look at pop density by state it is near the bottom, but almost all of that population is crammed into a small area near Salt Lake City. Similar situation in Nevada.
Density does correlate to spread, but only across relatively small areas of land. Averaging across a state as you say can result in misleading results.
You’re assuming everyone actually obeyed the restrictions which is a pretty funny assumption. It only takes one person in a household to go to a gathering that wasn’t supposed to happen (and there were plenty of those) and then come back and get everyone else sick.
In any case that 10% is ~10,000 people saved. For the brief period of time when people largely followed the restrictions I feel like that is a good ROI. That’s 3 September 11ths, what did we sacrifice trying to avoid another one of those?
If we are not willing to enforce the restrictions to the point that they will be effective in carrying out their intended purpose, then there should be no such restrictions.
Three 911's is meaningless to compare because the response is so much different. A better comparison would be 0.2 bad flu seasons. Because no one ever wore a mask during a bad flu season, not to mention any of the actually relevant and economically damaging measures taken to stop covid.
Whose restrictions?
I was "critical infrastructure" and went to many mine sites. MSHA guidance was basically to continue with safety protocols which includes to stay home if sick. Nobody was wearing masks because they dangerously limit vision. The mine sites were great to work at during the fear-fest because people were rational. One mine had a pig roast for the employees and families and it was glorious to sit elbow-to-elbow with real people.
Going to shop for a part had ridiculous OSHA-inspired theater with signs and where to walk and masks and counting people.
It was a mental trip to come off highly regulated mine sites and go to a grocery store filled with people participating in a scare-fest and making sure they followed directional arrows in the aisles. Like two different worlds.
'Some of the strictest control measures' is not how I would describe life for anyone in, say, the Central Valley.
Maybe people in the major coastal cities actually followed any of the difficult-to-enforce restrictions [1], but I can't say the same for the three quarters of America that is rural or suburban.
[1] Obviously, when schools are closed, that's a restriction you have no choice in following.
If you had asked me in 2019 for a prediction of what would happen if there had been a pandemic and one state followed CDC advice, and another said "fuck it, we're not doing anything," I would have said that the state that followed the expert guidance would have a dramatically better outcome. The fact that it didn't happen is very significant.
If you want to say that actually what CA did was effective, and the differences are all based on density/movement differences, then then you need to provide evidence. You can't just handwave it away by pointing to a possible factor.
Simply letting COVID run rampant may have done less economic damage because it’s vastly less deadly to working age populations, but we would have sacrificed a significant chunk of the population.
There are also the forgotten fears of mutation and the unknown of the disease. PPP was envisioned/passed around April 2020. Back then, we knew relatively little of the disease and feared it becoming deadlier and more transmissible if it were able to evolve. Fortunately, it didn't (to the degree we feared) but it very well may have if the US had simply let it run loose.
Princess Diamond taught the world early into it that some people didn't get sick, even when locked in room with spouse who was sick. There was some natural immunity.
> Simply letting COVID run rampant may have done less economic damage because it’s vastly less deadly to working age populations, but we would have barbarically sacrificed a significant chunk of the population for little gain
After being forced to pay for SS and Medicare for your entire working life, it is unreasonable to expect people to not use them, even if they believe that SS and Medicare should not exist. This is akin to wealthy professionals, who vote Democrat and support higher taxes, but nevertheless take advantage of all tax deductions available to them. Many such cases. There is nothing hypocritical here: it is pointless to damage yourself by either refusing SS checks or paying more taxes than you’re legally required, even if you are against SS or for higher taxes, because these individual actions will do nothing to bring about the policies you want.
"This is akin to wealthy professionals, who vote Democrat and support higher taxes, but nevertheless take advantage of all tax deductions available to them"
This counter example doesn't work because democrats aren't advocating for these to be changed
Naturally it's risky to assume that all Democrats agree with each other on every single policy position, but if you mean that Democrats aren't asking for more tax deductions, a very recent example of this very thing happening was with trying to roll back the SALT cap imposed by TCJA.
The median age of a Covid-associated death in the US, with its hugely obese and unhealthy population, is about the same as the average life expectancy. (You can see here[0] that over half of all "deaths involving Covid" are aged 75 and over, compared against the US life expectancy between 78-79.)
You refer to "less economic damage", but that's the least of it. Diseases and deaths of despair like suicides or drug abuse shot up tremendously. Civil liberties were greatly degraded, and precedent has now been set for substantial suspension of normal life by executive fiat -- the old adage of never letting a crisis go to waste rings true. It's incomprehensibly more barbaric the way that we insisted on schools closing for multiple years, with most of the burden of learning loss falling on children whose parents aren't wealthy enough to hire private tutors or even have a separate room in their house for their so-called remote classes. In a country where a fifth of high-school graduates are functionally illiterate, that's a real tragedy.
All this for a disease that more often than not kills those who were already going to die very soon, anyway! Of course people think mistakes were made in policy.
You just described what happened with mitigating strategies but 1 million dead are the good outcome not what would have happened if we lead the disease run rampant. We didn’t have an option for nobody died and nothing bad happened, just how many deaths where acceptable.
As to COVID just taking those near death, looking at just the US deaths from COVID in 2020 estimates suggest on average people would have lived another 14.5 years if they hadn’t been infected. But that understates the impact as the elderly got vaccinated earlier so 2021 and 2022 deaths tended to be younger than 2020 deaths. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/06/16/americans-l...
In a world without social distancing the extra deaths would have largely come from younger healthier people who couldn’t get access to basic treatments from a healthcare system past the breaking point.
> on average people would have lived another 14.5 years if they hadn’t been infected
How did you get that from your Pew Research source? The math on 5.5 million life-years lost over 330 million Americans works out to 6 days per person. Are you referring to a different source?
The one I found regarding US Covid deaths in 2020[0] shows more or less the same distribution, with over half of the 378k deaths being over age 75. For your statement (that the average person who died of Covid would have had another 14.5 years to live to the average life expectancy) to be true, the average Covid death would have to be roughly around 64. The 55-64 age group of Covid deaths in 2020 was under the 20th percentile, so I can't see how that works out.
In a world without state-mandated social distancing, perhaps the most vulnerable would have distanced on their own, avoiding getting sick and breaking the healthcare system, and the younger, healthier people could have lived on as usual.
Only people who died lost time, so it’s 380k people losing 5.5 million years. If you want the time for the total population you need to consider some people survived also have reduced life expectancy due to complications, but that’s harder to calculate.
85 is 6.7 years
80 is 9.3 years
75 is 12.4 years
70 is 15.9 years
65 is 19.6 years
60 is 23.5 years
55 is 27.5 years
50 is 31.8 years
45 is 36.3 years
As to your mistake yes mostly old people die but it’s easy to underestimate how long 75 to 80 year olds live who and how quickly to population dies off. Almost the same number of people died between 75 and 80 who collectively had a 10+ year life expectancy vs 80+ because the population over 80 is so much smaller. Similarly the 80 to 85 year deaths make up a large fraction of the 80+ year old deaths and they had a ~7-8 year life expectancy etc. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1191568/reported-deaths-...
Actual numbers may have been somewhat lower than 16 years on average as people who died tended to have other risk factors beyond age, but by no means was everyone on deaths door.
Even if we legally went back to normal that doesn't mean consumer demand would have gone back to normal. It was pretty clear that it wouldn't have gone back to normal until the vaccine was rolled out.
I don't care what the government rules would have been, I wouldn't have been travelling/commuting to the office/going to the bar at any point in 2020. My employer would not have been organizing any in-person conferences.
Which would, without the PPP/unemployment stopgap, would have happily put most of the firms in the travel/hospitality/conference organization industry out of business, due to a temporary disruption.
Liquidating a firm, and then coming back in a few years is not like turning a light switch off and on.
It's like leaving a car to rust unattended in a field for a decade, and coming back to it. It's not going to be running, and it's going to take a mountain of work to get it into a running state.
That's precisely why letting all these businesses die because of a temporary pandemic disruption is the penny-wise, pound-foolish decision.
If you think it's fair for the owner class to have paid for PPP, I can get behind that, as I'm all for wealth taxes/increasing capital gains taxes/???.
Usually courts in bankruptcy/liquidation release enough funds to maintain value.
Many of these businesses were closed due to covid anyway and in barebones maintenance mode, as court would do if they felt there was some value left to sell.
Sometimes bankruptcies are nearly invisible to customers and all in the background while creditors/investors lose their shirts.
Yes, the IFR has been consistently estimated at 0.4 to 0.7 since February 2020. 0.5% of 8B world population works out to 160M excess deaths. This calculation assumes availability of medical facilities at 100% with no dead doctors or nurses. I don't think our public facilities can handle so many excess dead bodies unless we let some float down the river.
"Adjusting for delay from confirmation to death, we estimated case and infection fatality ratios (CFR, IFR) for coronavirus disease (COVID-19) on the Diamond Princess ship as 2.6% (95% confidence interval (CI): 0.89–6.7) and 1.3% (95% CI: 0.38–3.6), respectively. Comparing deaths on board with expected deaths based on naive CFR estimates from China, we estimated CFR and IFR in China to be 1.2% (95% CI: 0.3–2.7) and 0.6% (95% CI: 0.2–1.3), respectively."
"Using public and published information, we estimate that the overall symptomatic case fatality risk (the probability of dying after developing symptoms) of COVID-19 in Wuhan was 1.4% (0.9–2.1%), which is substantially lower than both the corresponding crude or naïve confirmed case fatality risk"
So, just to emphasize, the Government gave out EIGHT HUNDRED BILLION DOLLARS to business owners, who are going to be well-to-do or better, as "loans", and then just forgave them quietly.
Honestly, those people who were being fraudulent actually were doing the right thing, because it siphoned money off from this egregious example rich people getting money outright and redirected it to the "demand" side of the population. And let's face it, the larger corporations can simply shuttle around accounting to make whatever look legit it needs.
Politicians are not stupid and they are not incompetent. These laws were very effective at their intended purpose of helping political cronies steal the money. Whether it's emergency flu fighting F35's or programs for the homeless that do not help the homeless, these results are intentional.
The reason it's associated with morality is because the idea of wronging someone implies that the one who is wronged is owed something. By offering forgiveness, what was owed is remitted. This also applies in the idea of sin, an offense against that which is divine.
And it applies in the context of a loan, where one party is owed something by another.
So, in the concept of forgiveness, it is the owing that is important. Any implication of morality is incidental.
But, also, there are indeed moral systems that consider borrowing money to be wrong. Although that's uncommon, and perhaps you were arguing that those moral systems are incorrect.
This shuldn't be a surprise: they were always grants de facto. They were simply implemented by wedging them into an existing program which was a loan program.
If anything is surprising it's that less than 100% weren't forgiven. As for fraud, well, the feds know how to prosecute it whether it was for a loan or a grant.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 262 ms ] threadI would prefer the counterfactual where nobody was forced to close (any longer than maybe the first couple of weeks) and therefore nobody got helicopter money; but since that isn't what happened, the next best thing would be aggressive prosecution of fraud. One can dream.
>it was to compensate businesses for being forced to close
More specifically, it was to "protect paychecks", to keep workers on the payroll who otherwise would have been let go. Sometimes, but not always, one of those workers was the business owner. In theory it was a pass-through benefit aimed at workers, but the employers not only had the loans forgiven, but also got a tax deduction for spending the government's money, and even sweeter in some cases, got increased tax basis in their business for the loan money they never repaid.
> PPP loans went to "job creators", always a favorite politically-protected class.
Both PPP and EIDL were to businesses. Not to individuals.
PPP was not a loan program. It was a grant. EIDL was a loan, and that was the program that had forgiveness. Being awarded PPP money required that you disclose payroll data before, during and after, and if you failed to meet terms, it would be converted to a loan. EIDL worked differently, if you met forgiveness, a percentage of your loan would be forgiven (I seem to recall 60% being the cap, but I could be wrong). In PPP there were caps on the amount a business owner could claim for their own compensation as a worker in the business.
> got increased tax basis in their business for the loan money they never repaid.
PPP was not a loan, it was a grant to cover payroll and unavoidable (i.e. rent) expenses during the initial lockdown. The IRS initially wanted to tax that (and for small businesses, that is at the personal rate of the owner) grant amount, which would have blunted the effect of PPP by 25-30%. The Trump adminstration stepped in and told the IRS to stand down, and changed the rules to prevent that. The purpose of PPP was really to ensure that businesses did not shut down permanently. The fact is that most small business only have sufficient cash to handle about 90 days of payroll and rent. Keeping the businesses alive would enable a faster rebound, because there was a study that estimated it would take eight years to re-grow that sector if those businesses were forced to shut down.
We chose not take a PPP loan because our industry saw record growth during Covid and it wasn't morally right to take advantage of a program meant for struggling businesses. Our competitors received money even though they also had record revenue growth. We were punished for doing the right thing because that capital could been have been used to invest in the business.
PPP had two goals: prevent business closures and layoffs, and stimulate the business economy (companies were cutting spending too). Yes, the capital could have been used to invest in the business, hire more people, etc, which all stimulate economic activity.
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2020/04/15/2020-07...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paycheck_Protection_Program - scroll to purpose
This was absolutely a lifesaver for some businesses (hospitality industry, small biz retail.) But for the other parts of the economy which kept working, it was absolutely free money.
That is not always the case. Sometimes there is no profit to pay a dividend with. In a bad year, like 2020, that is usually the case.
> But for the other parts of the economy which kept working, it was absolutely free money.
Maybe, but I really think the image presented in a lot of articles like this is PPP was just 100% fat cats getting an extra serving of caviar. It was estimated at the time PPP went into effect that we were at risk of losing 71% of the small business economy, and that it would take eight years for the sector to recover... which would have been devastating to GDP, taxes and so on. The truth is probably between 0 and 71%, and the recovery time could have been less. I suspect PPP will be studied in the future as a starting point for dealing with other massive natural disasters that disrupt the national economy.
A good example is the Covid lockdowns that benefited the likes of Amazon or Home Depot at the expense of Main Street businesses. Cui bono? Certainly the wealthy class did. But did they collude and whisper into the ears of the halls of power in federal, state, and local levels (which all played roles in lockdowns) to make sure that people were forced to lock down harder and longer? No -- it's just the incentive structure. Politicians and bureaucrats had the choice between being rewarded for taking "decisive action" against the spread of the virus or pilloried for doing nothing, even if in hindsight it appears that we would have been better off doing nothing.
Stuff like this is precisely why conservatives argue for limited government and more delegation of powers to lower levels of government. It's much easier for a wealthy person to have pull on a single US senator to make themselves more wealthy, than for that same person to have pull on twenty different state senators, or five hundred different city councilors.
I highly doubt the people engaging in PPP/Covid fraud are the typical power players in gov. Those people steal money through much more legal means like gov grants and contracts that end up costing 4x and taking 2x longer.
Also, this was actually authorized by Congress and not declared by fiat in an enormous executive overreach.
Which businesses? We're also looking with hindsight bias. There's no way to see what would have happened if businesses weren't bailed out.
There are people who will swear up and down that welfare is the root of all evil. That bootstrap pulling is necessary, that there's opportunity for everyone regardless of their situation, and that all you need is hard work and dedication to succeed in the US. They will wring their hands about the federal deficit and will howl about the size of the national debt. Just look at the student loan forgiveness issue.
But if you dangle a $6K per head loan in front of them, with no consequences whatsoever, every one of these same people will take and say "what did you expect me to do? I've got a business to run." Because for the vast majority of them, complaining about welfare was never about their taxes, or even considering the plight of the individuals who need the money.
It's about the thing that they complain the "woke" masses of doing.
It's virtue signaling. It was never about the money. It was about self-justification.
I don't know about welfare being the root of all evil, but there are valid discussions to be had on that topic from people arguing in good faith, and I think it's perfectly justified for someone to feel that their taxes are too high or that welfare benefits provide too much.
https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/irs-advises-that-improperly-for...
Sadly, this usually is the people who tried a fraud for the first time instead of those who are experts at repeated frauds. Nobody follows the letter of the law like someone violating the spirit.
I agree that they may hit a few thousands at most, and much of the "fraud" is unprovable (e.g., companies that would have survived without a PPP loan but got one anyway, etc).
Nothing except that peaky thing called political reality that tends to get in the way of every ham-fisted enforcement action that the pro-jackboot subset of any given democracy is calling for at any particular minute.
Remember back when they tried hiring more IRS agents? The left made memes about government turning the screws on the poors once again. The right made memes about shooting feds. It was very clear that few on either side of the isle supports that kind of stuff right now.
Political reality precludes making even a suggestion of doing that prior to November 9th or thereabouts. The PPP fraud is a dead bloated deer in the middle of the political road at 3pm on a Friday. And 2/2 employees of the animal control department are hoping the weekend guy can deal with it if the coyotes don't get to it first.
And frankly, I kind agree. It's water under the bridge at this point and while the fraud was predicted it did mostly get dumped into the economy as intended and there's no way to know we didn't avert a worse crisis by doing that, fraud and all.
It's hard to make a program like that quick enough to be effective without allowing fraud so I get the free for all style distribution. But especially with programs like TARP/PPP where the recipients are generally _already wealthy_ and the payments are relatively large, I'd like to see some after-the-fact scrutiny where people who commit fraud are punished, otherwise it reinforces the impression that money buys impunity.
This is happening, it's just slow. For example [1].
[1] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/california-man-sentenced-over...
Wasn't that the reasoning behind structuring PPP as loans? Get the money out as a loan, then forgive/not-forgive later after the borrower submits paperwork proving the funds were used appropriately.
It appears that second phase isn't happening - the government is just forgiving everything.
It's a defensive inference, to defend our belief that authorities wouldn't attempt to solve a crisis by just transferring a trillion dollars from lower rungs on the economic latter directly to higher rungs on the ladder.
We want to believe that the distribution of wealth is caused by individual behavior, that every person deserves their station in life however opulent or impoverished. We want to ignore the systems of power and privilege that exploit the low to further enrich the high.
But PPP strips away even the veneer of fairness and lays bare the brutal mechanics of wealth distribution based on power instead of contribution or merit.
Perhaps the reason PPP was structured as loans instead of grants was to maintain that fig leaf of fairness, to allow us to continue to defend the indefensible.
Everything you're suggesting here is just standard left-wing political worldview wrapped in a narrative device of "we believe <the system works>, but really it doesn't".
Also, ignoring fraud, wouldn't the flow of capital for PPP be primarily to the lower rungs, not from them? The money was to keep paying hourly wage employees in factories and retail while the business was shut down, right?
Maybe I'm mistaken about how the program worked, but I thought it was essentially the government stepping in to provide funds for payroll.
That's sort of the entire narrative here, though. In theory, you are correct. BUT - the "loans" being forgiven across the board is, essentially, removing the step where businesses prove that the money was used for what it was supposed to be used for. So, absent concrete proof, it is easy to speculate that this was just another wealth transfer to the top.
Will we ever know? Probably not. But it's one more thing to throw onto the outrage bonfire for every side. It gives the left something to talk about (look at the wealth transfer to the rich). It give the right something to talk about (look at this gross overspend by the government). It gives the middle something to talk about (look at how smart we are knowing that this would happen).
And it's all political theater.
These are my opinions.
Edit: that being said, look at the comments in this thread for literal arguments that are examples of every single point in that last paragraph.
If the objective is to get cash into the pockets of workers, you can just give it to them directly, and they'll get 100% of it.
The only possible rationale for implementing a Rube Goldberg system like PPP is if you intend for the vast majority of the funds to get siphoned off by the wealthy long before it makes it down to workers.
That objective was achieved by opening up the unemployment taps.
The objective of PPP was to prevent the destruction of half the businesses in the economy, which would have had knock-on-effects that would have taken years and decades to fully unravel.
Think of the bullwhip effect in supply chains that everyone's been bitching about for the past two years. Now, multiply it times ten, because half the participants in the economy collapsed, and their replacements have not gotten their shit together yet, and won't for another five years.
Businesses collapsing, and ~identical businesses re-opening next year destroys massive amounts of value. The value was in the human knowledge, connections, contracts, and relationships between them and their suppliers/customers. You lose all of that. PPP was a stop-gap measure to reduce the # of these losses.
But, unemployment isn't the only thing we can use, because it does have strings. We expect you to be looking for another job every week, and proving it. The social security system is setup to distribute money to every American with a social security number, in a far more streamlined system. There are also nice systems in place that limit the amount you get from social security in the case that you're earning more than a limit. I think social security being extended to all Americans, letting them stay "at" their job even if it was shut down, and setting a floor for income at this time which would make sure the business owners were also able to buy their basic essentials, but not Lamborghinis, would have been the right move. I understand this would require something to help businesses with rent while they were unable to operate. A national rent holiday to cover the emergency of the pandemic would be one idea, or bailing out the banks that were effected.
The way this was implemented isn't the only way it could be implemented is all I'm saying, lots of countries did it other ways, and they didn't collapse in on themselves at the end of covid. The PPP program is not the only solution to keeping workers connected to their jobs, but it sure did create a lot of opportunities for fraud. There are podcasts that took hundreds of thousands of dollars of PPP money. A podcast.
We don't live in a better world, finance has a stranglehold on our politics, and PPP was a better alternative than no-PPP. There's much to criticise it, and I don't think it was the best among all possible options, but I do think it was vastly better than nothing (Or just paying people through UI, while their employers fold).
Unemployment compensation generally does not go to employed people.
It let them flush themselves with cash while claim a loss on paper and reduce/reverse their taxes that year.
Think of it as an API adaptor.
Many non-savvy small businesses missed out in part due to lack of accounting help and lack of banking relationships for the application papers.
If this was to keep employees working, then the fastest way would be to credit the employer payroll tax federal withholding back to the employer after the employer sent it to the Feds. That is an existing channel and would be based on verified employee pay withholding.
There weren’t a lot of tools and time was short. Would be worth thinking through for next time though. And let’s hope there isnt a next time.
What are law makers doing right now to prepare for the possible effects of this recession? What are we doing to predict which parts of the financial system will collapse? What are we doing to prepare if CO-VID mutates into a deadly strain? We've known for 30 years that the climate will change, have we done anything to prepare for the consequences of that?
Why must we always need to react and pass TARP or PPP within a week time-frame or the entire economy crumbles?
to your point, archaeologists have been scuba diving to sunken coastal Greek and Roman era cities all around Mediterranean coasts for decades too, sunken from sea level rising may meters over the last couple thousand years.
Just another interesting datapoint straight from National Geographic magazines as a kid, before politicians really grabbed hold of global warming.
That's the climate change denialism equivalent of "my grandma smoked her whole life and didn't get lung cancer, so these scientists don't know what they're talking about".
There are 3 groups
1. People that think we should stop at nothing, including resetting the global economy, to stop climate change
2. People that think Humanity can and will adapt to the changing environment and that is the best course
3. People that think nothing is changing, and everything is fine
4. People that think climate change is real, and investments to mitigate damages should be weighed on a cost/benefit basis.
That is to say, for a given change, how much will it hurt people to mitigate it now vs later, given the time value of money and exponential development.
People in #1 and #2 dogmatically believe the answer always falls into act now or act later.
Luckily, most governments end up taking some sort of a middle road between these extremes.
Most people disagree
You telegraph your sympathies.
Global civilization collapse followed by billions starving and thermonuclear war will not end up good for anybody. But with some luck you could die first, something foot-draggers seem to count on. Why should they risk any hint of (expected) discomfort for benefits they would not anyway live to see? What have their grandchildren ever done for them?
ROFL.... nothing is further from the truth, the cost of "green" energy is massively regressive for people in "rich" nations like the US. Hell just the cost of replacing gas cars with EV's would be HUGE on most people, and EV can not replace every type of vehicle (see people that have to tow anything)
That is not getting into the huge problem for norther climates where sure Heat pumps have come a long way but still are not as good as a NatGas for extreme cold climate
There are countless other technological problems that will make daily expenses of people massively more costly than they are with traditional energy.
Energy from renewables will be vastly cheaper than humanity has ever experienced since the forests were wiped out, and will fuel a golden age. Provided, of course, that civilization does not collapse first, as you seem to say you would prefer.
> Energy from renewables will be vastly cheaper than humanity has ever experienced
Handwaving "will be" is not good enough for policy.
You are very confused about this "category 1". Literally nobody advocates for any measure that would interfere with economic prosperity. Action preventing climate catastrophe and collapse of civilization would discomfit only those heavily bought into the petroleum economy.
If all-in renewable energy costs including storage do in fact continue to decline at the rate you imply it will, then it looks like we won't have to do anything special to bring about the end of fossil fuels. Prices will do that automatically.
> Literally nobody advocates for any measure that would interfere with economic prosperity
Most every proposed solution I've seen to the imminent climate catastrophe involves making it more expensive to maintain current living standards, maybe with a side order of claiming current living standards are immoral. What are these measures that make substantial headway against climate change without making people poorer?
> those heavily bought into the petroleum economy
You don't have to own stock in Exxon and Shell to be "bought in" to the petroleum economy. The global economy is the petroleum economy, because in the aggregate every problem facing humanity is an energy problem. I don't think many people particularly care where their energy comes from, as long as it comes to them cheaply and reliably, and so far fossil fuels have other sources beat.
I'm not invested either emotionally or financially in seeing the continued success of fossil fuels; I'm invested in maintaining high living standards for myself and raising the living standards of the global poor. I remain skeptical that climate change will collapse civilization anytime soon.
False. Every solution involves producing energy radically more cheaply than any ever before, with no chokehold by any gatekeeper. I can see why this would be unattractive to you, if it might interfere with personally raising your own standard of living relative to your neighbors.
Further outside of Nuclear, energy from renewables is not cheaper not even close, and they have the unfortunate side effect of being non-predictable and subject to nature which petrol and nuclear do not. Wind and Solar are the worst and most expensive at this but as we have seen recently extreme drought may impact Hydro as well.
So we go back to the 3 Categories of person, I believe renewables need more time for innovation and are probably about 20+ years out needing not only more advancement on the production side but also needing some massive innovation on energy storage systems in order to effectively replace petrol, and artificially advancing that time table via government fiat will destabilize the world faster and worse than climate change, especially we do in the moronic way governments are today with things like Fertilizer bans, Gas Car bans, and other mandates that ban the use of some products / services
In the same way I oppose the government prohibition of drugs, I oppose the government prohibiting farmers from using fertilizer, and I oppose the government prohibiting people from buying gas cars
Government prohibition like that rarely work and often produce all kinds of unintended negative consequences
Number 2 is naive and glib. Of course "humanity will adapt", but that adaptation will be in the form of horrific suffering for billions and lower quality of life for everyone in the future.
On a serious note, how would you categorize yourself? i.e. what 4th group would you add?
Create a flat carbon tax to make all products and transportation reflect their true cost rather than letting people profit by poisoning the commons. Remove the artificial barriers to nuclear that make it cost prohibitive to start a new plant. Allocate more resources to re-training fossil fuel industry laborers into new careers. Allocate more resources into finding technology to make lower carbon cement, steel and fertilizer.
We don't need to radically alter the existing economy or society. We need to make some minor tweaks so align economic incentives, stop letting people freeload off of polluting activities and allocate tax dollars to programs that are more beneficial.
Unless you think that we can have a second Manhattan Project and dedicate half a percent of GDP to that end and get something usable on the other side ;-)
Not at all! The collapse of the Sri Lankan agricultural sector shows that plenty of people in poorer countries will also suffer in the pursuit of climate idealism.
I just thought the longer term cycles not man made are interesting.
The sunken urban areas explored lately are mostly subsidence, e.g. Heraklion off Egypt.
That said, there is a great deal of underwater urban stuff off India not accounted for by subsidence. And a million square miles off southeast Asia still unexplored, that might or might not be urban. That would be any from before 8kya.
I just saw an interesting article about long term cycles that predate the industrial era.
The notion of an "official" definition, and that it must be "declared" were introduced when the prior definition indicated a recession and the powers that be either did not want to admit there was one, or did not think this one should really qualify.
Ok, that's part 3. Somebody supply part 4.
No. No they do not. The official definition is 2 quarters -- the layperson defines it to be whatever they feel like.
If we are, it's the strangest recession I've ever encountered, with sky-high, record levels of job openings, rising wages, lots of robust job growth, expanding manufacturing, rising prices, product shortages, etc.
There are a lot of headwinds, and the business cycle indeed seems to have turned down. Based on rising rates, reduced credit, and an increasing trend of layoffs, I bet we are indeed heading into a recession.
But it sure does not feel like it currently.
Although there was an expectation that some of the asset purchases might turn out to be valueless, or that loans not be repaid; there was no concept of loan-forgiveness baked into the bailout. Indeed, basically of the TARP money was repaid in full.
PPP's definition of success, on the other hand, was that jobs would be preserved, resulting in the forgiveness of the loans.
Sorta. If you invested money at the bottom of the market in late 08/early 2009 and only broke even several years later, you must have set half the money on fire (edit: or embezzled it).
Still sounds like gov took the downside risk while shielding themselves from the upside.
Actually it's a bit more complicated, because the preferred stock was also issued with 10 year warrants to buy common stock with an exercise price based on the company stock at the time of issuance. The warrants could be repurchased at fair market value, or they would end up being auctioned by the Treasury.
So the Treasury did also have upside participation. e.g. Morgan Stanley repurchased its warrants for $950M vs. its $10B preferred stock sale.
The preferred stock also came with all kinds of covenants that related to government policy objectives (capping of common stock dividends, initial limitations on redemption absent a successful raising of equity, executive compensation restrictions) which really frustrate the notion of "pricing" this.
The point still remains; the premise of TARP was "the only way the government loses the entire pot is if the program fails disastrously and the entire financial sector fails" whereas the premise of PPP was "the desired outcome is that all the loans are forgiven and the government loses the whole pot".
TARP disbursed $440 billion in exchange for assets, and received back $443 billion to return those assets[0]. It made a small profit for taxpayers.
PPP is... not that.
0. https://www.thebalancemoney.com/tarp-bailout-program-3305895
Or, here me out, we stop giving rich people money regardless. I can see a program that protects businesses in 2020 since they were shut down, but think we could have had a better program than the PPP. I don't understand why we didn't just let companies in 2008 go bankrupt. Can someone explain it to me?
Once you understand what was happening the solution of first solving the liquidity crisis (by having the government front the liquidity; note that all of the banks paid back the TARP money), and then instituting strict capitalization regulations on banks (ie Dodd-Frank and Basel II which hurt their profits by reducing risk) to avoid the same thing happening again and remove some of the moral hazard is a perfectly reasonable policy response.
Besides, it seemed from the outside to very much be a solvency/asset price issue. Mortgages were being defaulted on, money was owed. If GS or AIG went out of business and ended up being a subsidiary of Burry's fund, who does that hurt. GS's customers have their money/shares GS manages sequestered so it's not like Main Street would lose their portfolios (although they would have to write down the value)
None of this excuses the lack of oversight, but the initial overreaction may have been rational.
Inflation related stimulus is of course farcical.
If there’s a 50% chance of total economic meltdown, and you can avert it with a few years of high inflation, that might still be the correct decision, even if the doomsday scenario doesn’t come true.
The next group of politicians will have "learned" from this - in the sense that people will have voted them in based on whatever random views they had that matched with how the will of the people has changed.
I doubt existing politicians ever learn anything. Especially when our politicians pride themselves on "not flipping" on views. How are you supposed to learn anything if you never change your mind?
We don't elect people who learn. We elect people who we think are always right (charlatans).
I skeptical the people we elect in next will have any better ideas, because I don't think "we" learned anything from this either.
The program was really a bailout so businesses could maintain their payrolls when everything was shutdown. Instead of writing the checks directly, the government decided to frame it as a loan that would be forgiven if businesses stayed in business and spent it on their payrolls. This was a good strategy for the government, because it would have been pretty tough to enforce otherwise.
So the loan forgiveness was by _design_ and the point of the program was to keep businesses alive when the governments themselves were (for perhaps good reason) making it impossible for them to operate. It's not really "forgiveness" in the sense of, say, the college loan forgiveness program.
You kept people employed and on their employers insurance, benefits, etc. You let businesses try to remain as operational as possible during the shut down.
The alternative was going to be mass layoffs, unemployment and medicaid/aca applications.
The people who keep harping on PPP seem to forget everything else that was done in the same time period.
/s
https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20220802/havent-had-covid-ye...
I think this is a key point.
The PPP "loans" effectively became a payout to mitigate the chance & success of businesses suing the government en mass for the shutdown orders.
When you sue an entity civilly, you have to show damages. The PPP "loans" countered those damages (and often more) which means the threshold for a successful lawsuit just got WAY higher.
Small businesses account for roughly 60% of all jobs in the U.S.
Yes, adding processes to reduce fraud would've been helpful in reducing waste, but how do you suppose that should've happened? What kind of infrastructure do we have to means test that many businesses? Could it have happened within a typical pay period or two? How were workers/businesses supposed to eat and pay bills until then?
I do believe that those whose educations wer disrupted by the pandemic should be compensated by having their loans forgiven.
This has to do with government mandates causing monetary harm.
They aren't even usually aware when the rich guy in the other neighborhood got a handout.
But hey, that's the system and they chose to play it. Maybe a requirement to post on the physical business how much pandemic money they've got would be an easy middle ground.
I'm glad he told me though so I can I understand what really keeps businesses going.
Anecdotally of the handful of business owners that I know personally who received PPP funds (3 businesses total), all needed the loan, used it to maintain payroll, and all of them had their loans forgiven.
He then continued running the business at a loss, paying out of his own pocket for the next year and only now has returned to something resembling profitability.
Why was the business operating at a loss? Because of the social changes brought about by COVID, it took over a year after the mandates were lifted for his customers to return to the status quo.
The year-by-year outlook of profit vs loss is arbitrary.
How did the decade by decade history look? Any losses?
Why not look at businesses second by second? Sometimes you’ll lose in 1 second what will take thousands of seconds in profit to make up.
Largely corps distribute their profits to protect past earnings against future losses, but risk short-term insolvency which should be at their own risk.
Likely they funded the ongoing survival of business because walking away from its equity value would have resulted in greater losses.
Two were small tech companies (not startups) that pivoted to WFH services in 2020, had their best years ever, and then returned to their normal work portfolio in 2022. Good years.
Five were restaurants I frequent. Two of those went out of business, two used PPP to pay salaries then laid folks off, and one had a fantastic year because they already had eds+meds+tech clientelle, were in a fairly good pandemic-weathering of the city (lots of SFHs and huge parks), and executed extremely well on the "delivery but we'll keep the social third place vibe going with various virtual events" model.
One is a auto dealership (well, a manager at an auto dealership). Basically used the PPP to pay salespeople salaries for a few months and by the time the first summer came around it was back to business as usual.
The rest were various other small businesses for whom PPP was basically purely supplemental income.
The only one I'm really sour about is a tradesman who did a bunch of under the table cash work (unreported so a 30% boost already) + got PPP + got enhanced unemployment. Almost two straight years of tax fraud. Bought a $300K boat and bunch of other toys this year.
All were forgiven.
Snitch on the tradesman, and you'll get 30% of whatever he stole if he's convicted.
In most cases the businesses were able to apply twice and get two separate awards. I'm not sure what the mechanism was for this as our business itself never applied for these loans.
In the aftermath of all of this there has been a distinct pattern emerging in which these small business owners have developed a kind of amnesia about the money they've received from these loans and have assigned the upward balance sheet inflection to their own "hard work" commitment and demonstrated acumen in negotiating the covid crisis.
I suppose this isn't exactly untrue, but there is no internalized recognition that this success was a one-time phenomenon due to a one-time windfall from the government.
Another anecdote somewhat unrelated is that the number of family-run (i.e. father and son/s) trades businesses in my local suburb all seem to have decided they need brand new work trucks at the same time. These vehicles are uniformly the upper end luxury trim levels of the line, lifted and stanced to absurdly aggressive proportions, and show no signs of being put to any of the actual work for which they would be utterly impractical anyway. The number of rear window stickers with Sparta helmets or some sort of depiction of an automatic weapon suggests the PPP loans may end up having inadvertently helped equip and arm a future informal militia.
On a similar note, the ~$2000 of assistance most Americans got went straight to landlords. This crisis was fully exploited by people who knew exactly what they were doing.
https://www.federalpay.org/paycheck-protection-program/top-l...
Seems the loans were capped at $10 million? Maybe I'm missing something...
But it seems any "they" that is able to manufacture an "accident" of this scale would see $10 million on a good market day.
I'm not at all saying there wasn't abuse but I don't see any conspiracy when incompetence or laziness makes much more sense.
Biggest wealth transfer to owners of small(ish) businesses ever!!!
>Overall, we find 1.41 million questionable loans representing $64.2 billion in capital with our primarƒy measures. These measures inevitably contain some false positives, which would lead to overstatements, and some flagged loans may have been legitimately eligible for smaller loans. However, the measures also miss many forms of suspicious lending, and sensitivity analysis indicates this total is likely substantially understated. Slightly lowering the threshold on the high implied compensation and considering excess loans in industry-county pairs beyond the number of establishments reported by the U.S. Census results in a total suspicious lending estimate of $117.3 billion.
So 64.2 or 117.3 out of 800 billion is suspicious at some level. That doesn't mean the entire value of those loans is fraud. Just that they were goosed to increase payout. So anywhere from a few percent to 15 percent. Which for how large and how fast is actually pretty darn good.
The real scandal here is that it was an ill-conceived program. The political powers at the time acted like we'd lock down for a few weeks and then everything would go back to normal. But that was pretty obviously not going to happen. Ultimately PPP had a marginal effect on what businesses survived. Most of the ones that did would have anyways. PPP was just money directly into those owners' pocket.
Even worse, lots of businesses went gang busters during Covid. So most of this PPP money went to the winners of the Covid economy instead of the losers. It was just one gigantic blunder.
I mean we should have. It was quite clear very early on that the computer models predicting 4% IFRs were off by almost an order of magnitude.
Models showing 4% IFRs without drastic measures like lockdowns seem fairly accurate to me. Simply letting COVID run rampant may have done less economic damage because it’s vastly less deadly to working age populations, but we would have barbarically sacrificed a significant chunk of the population for little gain.
The infection fatality rate is: deaths / anybody who is infected. Everybody is gonna get Covid, mitigations or not, so the denominator is always going to be the same. IFR is independent of mitigations.
The only way the IFR might change is if healthcare systems got so overrun that they could no longer give care. This did not happen anywhere in the industrialized world. In fact all of the temporary field hospitals here in the states were closed virtually.
The models showing a 4% IFR were pure fantasy. The IFR for a healthy human under like 65 is something less than %0.1. If you are a kid, your risks are lower than dying in a house fire.
Even with all the existing measures, many areas ran out of ICU beds. All those deferred surgeries had an actual cost in human lives because you can’t simply delay cancer treatment without issue. I will say it again, some people with cancer died because of the COVID pandemic even without getting infected.
Anything less than what we did would have further overburdened the healthcare system. Doing absolutely nothing and even less serious cases that responded to such basic measures as IV fluids would have killed people without a functioning healthcare system.
You can very easily argue that the mitigations we put in place were based on the theory that Covid only had a droplet based spread, like the flu. The problem is that Covid is fully airborne, like measles, so the mitigations we put into place were ineffective.
Social distancing is a good example:
A person infected with a virus that has a droplet based spread will spray out droplets when they cough or sneeze and those droplets will fall to the ground within six feet of their emission.
An airborne virus is emitted by people even when they are just breathing normally, and can stay suspended in the air for hours. An airborne virus will spread throughout an enclosed space.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00925-7
More recent versions are more easily transmissible but are dealing with higher levels of immunity due to vaccination and prior exposure. When modeling such repeated outbreaks people who where at the highest risk for transmission due to coming into contact with others regularly where also the first to gain immunity from less easily transmissible strains.
>CDC says seasonal flu cases hit record lows around the world
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/cold-and-flu/cdc-says-seasona...
> COVID may have pushed a leading seasonal flu strain to extinction
https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/09/covid-may-have-pushe...
Multiple COVID trackers shows a response to COVID mitigation strategies and their removal well outside of seasonal trends. Demonstrating unsurprisingly that transmission goes down when people spend less time around each other.
The initial theory on how Covid spreads was just wrong.
Following the science requires that you be capable of changing your mind when you have proof that you were wrong.
“Public health interventions and non-pharmaceutical measurements were effective in decreasing the transmission of COVID-19. The included studies showed that travel restrictions, borders measures, quarantine of travellers arriving from affected countries, city lockdown, restrictions of mass gathering, isolation and quarantine of confirmed cases and close contacts, social distancing measures, compulsory mask wearing, contact tracing and testing, school closures and personal protective equipment use among health workers were effective in mitigating the spread of COVID-19.” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8164261/
As to standing six feet apart. It’s true that COVID didn’t need droplets, but it could still make use of them. There is a concept of viral load during transmission because the human immune system is much more effective stopping a single virus from infection someone than 10,000 of them. Non specific immune responses don’t provide lasting immunity but they do prevent the vast majority of infection that cross surface barriers from having a noticeable impact.
>As 2021 drew to a close, the highly contagious Omicron variant of the pandemic virus was racing around the globe, forcing governments to take drastic actions once again. The Netherlands ordered most businesses to close on 19 December, Ireland set curfews and many countries imposed travel bans in the hope of taming the tsunami of COVID-19 cases filling hospitals. Amid the wave of desperate news around the year-end holidays, one group of researchers hailed a development that had seemed as though it might never arrive. On 23 December, the World Health Organization (WHO) uttered the one word it had previously seemed incapable of applying to the virus SARS-CoV-2: ‘airborne’.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00925-7
Social distancing by six feet cannot by definition be effective against a virus that floats in the air for hours and completely spreads through any enclosed space.
Transmission isn’t like computer virus which can only be spread via one specific method. Close content does increase the risk of transmission from a simple density function if nothing else.
No, if you follow the science you won't claim that social distancing can be effective against a virus that isn't limited to only spreading six feet before falling to the ground.
There are exponential returns on each case blocked because that cases doesn’t result in new cases. If the virus is still spreading exponentially then it’s simply delaying cases, but 1.01^X is monumentally different than 0.99^X even though you blocked 2% of transmissions.
Saying standing six feet apart only blocks X% of cases is therefore irrelevant on it’s own, it’s only relevant in the context of overall transmission.
In the end simply delaying COVID until after vaccination has saved over 1 million American lives. We could have done more, but we could also have done vastly less.
PS: I linked mounds actual peer reviewed science you have ignored so it’s clear this is just wasting time. But I home other people reading this thread may come to rational conclusions.
Sorry, but following the science requires the ability to admit you're wrong in the face of new evidence.
Wouldn't is just be easer to admit your wrong and that 6 feet social distancing does not stop covid. You were originally told incorrect information by, well everyone, and now that you know covid is airborne the 6 feet was worthless.
Edit: spelling
Shutting down schools was was huge, but you seem to want to talk about 6 feet like that’s the only thing that happened.
What masks and 6 feet separation had going for them which is easy to forget is how cheap they are. Closing schools is going to have knock on effects for decades, people standing further apart is practically free by comparison.
Do you have any proof that shutting down schools was huge? Everything I have seen says the exact opposite. Little to no benefit with massive decades long consequences.
You said originally you feel that lockdowns worked but again the actual world data does not agree with you. I listed two countries that as examples in my previous comment.
Here is a very comprehensive report on the lockdowns that looks at mortalities as well as economic impacts in the states:
https://www.nber.org/papers/w29928
Page 18 shows no correlation between lockdowns and mortality. This is using real world data.
Edit: missing words
Here’s a vastly more rigorous study: The differences between weights estimated by common and individualized models, although present, do not lead to drastically different conclusions—indeed, both models indicate that school closing has a large impact on virus transmission https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-21126-2
Also all the authors of your study seem to have an agenda of being pro lockdowns and push that.
You absolutely meant it as an attack. In fact the FIRST time I commented in a thread about 6 feet of social distancing, you jumped at me about how I only want to talk about 6 feet of social distancing. If I wanted to talk about the other stuff I probably would have commented somewhere else.
If I wanted to attack the paper I would have pointed out their anti school lockdown examples actually locked down schools thus invalidating their argument. It’s an argument that state governments could have opened schools and restaurants more frequently, not that closing them was never useful.
There are hundreds of peer review studies you can chose from and the vast majority show closing schools was useful. The better ones point out that they could have been open sooner in most areas as long as they where willing to close them should cases rise.
The fact we had plans zero clue if this stuff would work at all is reason enough to not do it. We subjected billions of people to a uncontrolled experiment. Worse it was without consent.
The hard part is assessing the cost and benefit of each of them individually.
Are you sure, especially particularly early & also this late? My understanding is that several crucial treatments were mass-deferred, several places had no beds, the dead were literally stacked on trucks, and the medical system has been utterly destroyed either from staff falling ill or getting so emotionally destroyed that they've quit. Wasn't there a mainstream situation a bit ago where a nurse literally had to call the fire department because of lack of medical staff?
My understanding is that hospitals still haven't recovered in terms of staffing.
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/health/wa-hospital...
What world do you live in? It certainly isn't mine. One of my co-workers passed away in her home after being turned away from the ER in part due to no hospitals in the area having available ventilators.
source: https://www.bioinformaticscro.com/blog/states-ranked-by-age-...
That said, look at the worst states on that list and you will notice a trend. Mississippi, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Kentucky, Alabama aren’t the states with extremely high density cities like NYC with the highest natural transmission rates, they are the states that failed.
Especially when you consider Delaware’s 33.5% obesity in 2018 somehow only resulted in 289. Turns out states with stronger responses had better results independent of what population density and demographics would suggest.
Also density measurement is hard. Does Utah count as "dense?" If you look at pop density by state it is near the bottom, but almost all of that population is crammed into a small area near Salt Lake City. Similar situation in Nevada.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/323722513_Effect_of...
In any case that 10% is ~10,000 people saved. For the brief period of time when people largely followed the restrictions I feel like that is a good ROI. That’s 3 September 11ths, what did we sacrifice trying to avoid another one of those?
Three 911's is meaningless to compare because the response is so much different. A better comparison would be 0.2 bad flu seasons. Because no one ever wore a mask during a bad flu season, not to mention any of the actually relevant and economically damaging measures taken to stop covid.
Not true - picture from 1918
https://www.gannett-cdn.com/presto/2021/12/17/USAT/bbeb7dc2-...
Also, a million people out of the labor force because they're dead seems like it would have a negative economic impact
Going to shop for a part had ridiculous OSHA-inspired theater with signs and where to walk and masks and counting people.
It was a mental trip to come off highly regulated mine sites and go to a grocery store filled with people participating in a scare-fest and making sure they followed directional arrows in the aisles. Like two different worlds.
The miners had it right.
Maybe people in the major coastal cities actually followed any of the difficult-to-enforce restrictions [1], but I can't say the same for the three quarters of America that is rural or suburban.
[1] Obviously, when schools are closed, that's a restriction you have no choice in following.
If you want to say that actually what CA did was effective, and the differences are all based on density/movement differences, then then you need to provide evidence. You can't just handwave it away by pointing to a possible factor.
There are also the forgotten fears of mutation and the unknown of the disease. PPP was envisioned/passed around April 2020. Back then, we knew relatively little of the disease and feared it becoming deadlier and more transmissible if it were able to evolve. Fortunately, it didn't (to the degree we feared) but it very well may have if the US had simply let it run loose.
Saved Medicare and SS spending.
This counter example doesn't work because democrats aren't advocating for these to be changed
Democrats haven't been advocating for that tax to be increased. They were mostly against it when it was voted on
The median age of a Covid-associated death in the US, with its hugely obese and unhealthy population, is about the same as the average life expectancy. (You can see here[0] that over half of all "deaths involving Covid" are aged 75 and over, compared against the US life expectancy between 78-79.)
You refer to "less economic damage", but that's the least of it. Diseases and deaths of despair like suicides or drug abuse shot up tremendously. Civil liberties were greatly degraded, and precedent has now been set for substantial suspension of normal life by executive fiat -- the old adage of never letting a crisis go to waste rings true. It's incomprehensibly more barbaric the way that we insisted on schools closing for multiple years, with most of the burden of learning loss falling on children whose parents aren't wealthy enough to hire private tutors or even have a separate room in their house for their so-called remote classes. In a country where a fifth of high-school graduates are functionally illiterate, that's a real tragedy.
All this for a disease that more often than not kills those who were already going to die very soon, anyway! Of course people think mistakes were made in policy.
[0]: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm
As to COVID just taking those near death, looking at just the US deaths from COVID in 2020 estimates suggest on average people would have lived another 14.5 years if they hadn’t been infected. But that understates the impact as the elderly got vaccinated earlier so 2021 and 2022 deaths tended to be younger than 2020 deaths. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/06/16/americans-l...
In a world without social distancing the extra deaths would have largely come from younger healthier people who couldn’t get access to basic treatments from a healthcare system past the breaking point.
How did you get that from your Pew Research source? The math on 5.5 million life-years lost over 330 million Americans works out to 6 days per person. Are you referring to a different source?
The one I found regarding US Covid deaths in 2020[0] shows more or less the same distribution, with over half of the 378k deaths being over age 75. For your statement (that the average person who died of Covid would have had another 14.5 years to live to the average life expectancy) to be true, the average Covid death would have to be roughly around 64. The 55-64 age group of Covid deaths in 2020 was under the 20th percentile, so I can't see how that works out.
In a world without state-mandated social distancing, perhaps the most vulnerable would have distanced on their own, avoiding getting sick and breaking the healthcare system, and the younger, healthier people could have lived on as usual.
[0]: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7014e1.htm
As to the calculation we want pre pandemic numbers average life expectancy for both genders: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr70/nvsr70-19.pdf
As to your mistake yes mostly old people die but it’s easy to underestimate how long 75 to 80 year olds live who and how quickly to population dies off. Almost the same number of people died between 75 and 80 who collectively had a 10+ year life expectancy vs 80+ because the population over 80 is so much smaller. Similarly the 80 to 85 year deaths make up a large fraction of the 80+ year old deaths and they had a ~7-8 year life expectancy etc. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1191568/reported-deaths-...Actual numbers may have been somewhat lower than 16 years on average as people who died tended to have other risk factors beyond age, but by no means was everyone on deaths door.
I don't care what the government rules would have been, I wouldn't have been travelling/commuting to the office/going to the bar at any point in 2020. My employer would not have been organizing any in-person conferences.
Which would, without the PPP/unemployment stopgap, would have happily put most of the firms in the travel/hospitality/conference organization industry out of business, due to a temporary disruption.
Sounds more like it was the creditors and investors that took on more risk than they could handle and got bailed out.
It's like leaving a car to rust unattended in a field for a decade, and coming back to it. It's not going to be running, and it's going to take a mountain of work to get it into a running state.
That's precisely why letting all these businesses die because of a temporary pandemic disruption is the penny-wise, pound-foolish decision.
If you think it's fair for the owner class to have paid for PPP, I can get behind that, as I'm all for wealth taxes/increasing capital gains taxes/???.
Many of these businesses were closed due to covid anyway and in barebones maintenance mode, as court would do if they felt there was some value left to sell.
Sometimes bankruptcies are nearly invisible to customers and all in the background while creditors/investors lose their shirts.
https://www.google.com/search?q=india+covid+19+floating+bodi...
March 2020 - IFR estimate in China 0.6%, CFR in China estimated as 1.2%
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7118348/
"Adjusting for delay from confirmation to death, we estimated case and infection fatality ratios (CFR, IFR) for coronavirus disease (COVID-19) on the Diamond Princess ship as 2.6% (95% confidence interval (CI): 0.89–6.7) and 1.3% (95% CI: 0.38–3.6), respectively. Comparing deaths on board with expected deaths based on naive CFR estimates from China, we estimated CFR and IFR in China to be 1.2% (95% CI: 0.3–2.7) and 0.6% (95% CI: 0.2–1.3), respectively."
March 2020 - Symptomatic case fatality risk 1.4% https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0822-7
"Using public and published information, we estimate that the overall symptomatic case fatality risk (the probability of dying after developing symptoms) of COVID-19 in Wuhan was 1.4% (0.9–2.1%), which is substantially lower than both the corresponding crude or naïve confirmed case fatality risk"
Honestly, those people who were being fraudulent actually were doing the right thing, because it siphoned money off from this egregious example rich people getting money outright and redirected it to the "demand" side of the population. And let's face it, the larger corporations can simply shuttle around accounting to make whatever look legit it needs.
Is there a statute-of-limitation on prosecution?
The reason it's associated with morality is because the idea of wronging someone implies that the one who is wronged is owed something. By offering forgiveness, what was owed is remitted. This also applies in the idea of sin, an offense against that which is divine.
And it applies in the context of a loan, where one party is owed something by another.
So, in the concept of forgiveness, it is the owing that is important. Any implication of morality is incidental.
But, also, there are indeed moral systems that consider borrowing money to be wrong. Although that's uncommon, and perhaps you were arguing that those moral systems are incorrect.
If anything is surprising it's that less than 100% weren't forgiven. As for fraud, well, the feds know how to prosecute it whether it was for a loan or a grant.
How could the US government allow this to happen is beyond me.
https://youtu.be/LhhoQbzupug
lifestylemarketingfinance@gmail.com WhatsApp: +27724423389
Sincerely.