> Loans, even cheap ones, are a very shity way of "helping" small businesses
Really disagree on this point. The primary value of a business is their assets, brands and expertise. All of those things will be just as valuable after the pandemic as they were before. Assets don't just disappear because they're not used.
This is just as true for small businesses as it is for big business. Any business that was profitable on Dec 31, 2019, will very likely be profitable on Jan 1, 2021. The biggest challenge for those businesses is surviving operating cash flow losses over the next three months. This is extra challenging in the current environment because financial markets are freezing up.
Yes, business owners will eat some loss to their personal wealth. Regardless of what happens there's no way to make up for the fact that the economy is shrinking this quarter. At an aggregate level, we'll all be slightly poorer then we expected to be. The point of a well-structured bailout isn't to make sure that nobody anywhere ever loses money. It's to prevent otherwise healthy businesses from permanently failing due to a temporary disruption in credit markets.
If a small business owner loses a year of income it sucks. If an entire small business capsizes, that has widespread economic impact because the economy incurs distress costs and loses its organizational and competitive expertise.