> The capital was either directly given to businesses, fraudulently and unnecessarily in many cases

Especially concerning when a bunch of politicians were in on it, ensuring that the money went out willy-nilly and that $700+ billion in "loans" were turned into a straight up gift from the taxpayers.

https://www.citizensforethics.org/reports-investigations/cre...

https://fortune.com/2020/07/08/ppp-loan-recipients-members-o...

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gruez 8 hours ago | parent [-]

>ensuring that the money went out willy-nilly and that $700+ billion in "loans" were turned into a straight up gift from the taxpayers.

Wasn't that widely understood during the pandemic? All the coverage I've seen mentioned that the loans for forgivable if certain criteria were met, and nobody was like "yeah it's fine because it's a loan!".

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cyberax 8 hours ago | parent [-]

The problem is that these loans went to _businesses_, not workers. There was an orgy of corruption, with newly formed LLCs claiming to have dozens of workers.

And then these loans were just forgiven. And since they went to businesses, Republicans are completely silent about that.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paycheck_Protection_Program

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laughing_man 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The loans went to businesses as a bribe to keep on employees they didn't need until the pandemic was over. If you just gave out money to unemployed people it's almost impossible to stop when the emergency is over.

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cute_boi 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I don't know why they keep voting republicans, they haven't done anything to benefit Americans.

	▲	gruez 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		But the bill in question passed the house 419 - 6 and the senate 96 - 0?

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Mountain_Skies 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Your partisan obsessed brain is why the political class gets away with this.

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cyberax 7 hours ago | parent [-]

Sorry, but "both sides" went out of the window in 2024.

There are _some_ decent Democrats in the Congress. There are also plenty of bad ones. There are NO decent Republicans in the Congress. And yes, reality appears to be partisan.

To the topic in question, PPP was not really a big deal. The real culprit is this: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CP - the corporate profits literally DOUBLED since 2020 because of earlier Trump's tax cuts.

	▲	gruez 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		>To the topic in question, PPP was not really a big deal. The real culprit is this: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CP - the corporate profits literally DOUBLED since 2020 because of earlier Trump's tax cuts. Not really. If you add data series for pre-tax profits and index both series to 2020, you see the two lines are basically on top of each other. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1X0JM