Comment by JKCalhoun
4 months ago
Saw someone recently post, "Greatest regret: not committing PPP fraud."
Lest we forget that little giveaway to the boss-class.
4 months ago
Saw someone recently post, "Greatest regret: not committing PPP fraud."
Lest we forget that little giveaway to the boss-class.
I caught a bit of the Netflix series Beast Games (gameshow hosted by Mr. Beast) and there was one segment where 10 contestants took turns taking "their share" from a $1,000,000 pile. The "fair" thing to do is to take $100,000 each. 1 player ended up taking $600k, but many players that came after continued to do the "fair" thing and split what was left evenly. One even took $0.
I was thinking today about Conservative fascination with trans folks. They certainly aren't segregating their bathrooms at home, but have some weird hangup with doing so in public.
I think some % of the population are "low trust" (most people won't do the right thing, therefore it's OK if I do not do the right thing/I need to protect myself) and some are "high trust" (most people will do the right thing, so I should do the right thing/I'm safe).
The US has been teetering towards a "low trust" cultural and political landscape and the way to drive this even further is to take away safety nets and create general economic chaos, effectively destroying social trust. Even the whole RTO debate is really a question of high/low trust; executives have low trust in the workers they hire so they want them in office, even if it's less productive, yields higher turnover, and leads to lower morale.
The reason Taiwan and New Zealand did so well during the pandemic is perhaps partially because they are both "high trust" societies; your fellow citizens generally did the right thing and followed the rules.
Framing RTO in terms of low/high trust society behavior makes a lot of sense and is not something I've seen done before in the debate.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-14421535/amp/YouT...
Aside: Mr. Beast claims to have lost tens of millions on the (Amazon) show Beast Games.
Amazon! Yes! The ads! Thanks for the correction.
Yes it was a program designed to to be defrauded while backstopping wages
They probably only said that after they realised exactly what the boss-class got away with.
Regrets are always with hindsight though.
PPP funds had to be used on employee salaries, and not just highly paid employees.
They sure did:
> Many who participated in what prosecutors are calling the largest fraud in U.S. history — the theft of hundreds of billions of dollars in taxpayer money intended to help those harmed by the coronavirus pandemic — couldn’t resist purchasing luxury automobiles. Also mansions, private jet flights and swanky vacations.
> They came into their riches by participating in what experts say is the theft of as much as $80 billion — or about 10 percent — of the $800 billion handed out in a Covid relief plan known as the Paycheck Protection Program, or PPP. That’s on top of the $90 billion to $400 billion believed to have been stolen from the $900 billion Covid unemployment relief program — at least half taken by international fraudsters — as NBC News reported last year. And another $80 billion potentially pilfered from a separate Covid disaster relief program.
> https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/justice-department/biggest-...
The company I worked for at the time took a large PPP loan. They never shut down, never sent anyone home, and business that year broke records.
So sure, they used it to pay employees, but they also pocketed what they would have used to pay employees.
Sure and some of this was only obvious in retrospect though. There were companies that would have laid off more people, earlier, for longer. And that wouldn’t have had sales during covid to support the jobs they spent PPP money on.
But also huge fraud which was by design.
A suboptimal but net positive program. What more could you expect from orange man.
My company took the funds and didn't die because of it. 100% went to employees.
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Yeah, and the multiple new cars that the owner bought were completely coincidental. Seeing the record of one loan forgiven, and then two weeks later a new PPP loan was obtained using the DBA name of the company, and the owners home address so it looked like a different business, and then also seeing the new lambo suv...
As much as you claim it had to be used on salaries, it mostly wasn't. That's why it's called fraud.