a religious school on same block as my house in nyc which refused to close down when there were dead bodies in trucks and also secretly served as wedding hall when wedding hall were shutdown, got 12 million dollars in loans, probably also got loan forgiveness.
America’s Covid job-saving programme gave most of its cash to the rich
291–300 of 433 posts
Re: America’s Covid job-saving programme gave most of its cash to the rich
#292Earlier quoted context omitted.
Citizens took home trillions this time around. The 2008 money was loans, that were paid back with interest. The citizens this time around got socialism (and related inflation). 2008 had neither.
Trillions?
Re: America’s Covid job-saving programme gave most of its cash to the rich
#293Earlier quoted context omitted.
Avoiding a civil revolt and the subsequent death count probably undercuts any such claim to morality, if we're using "human suffering" as the metric.
There may have been a population with more human suffering than former slave owners.
But that suffering wasn't increased by paying off the former slave owners. If anything, it may have reduced it by making it politically feasible to end slavery earlier.
Re: America’s Covid job-saving programme gave most of its cash to the rich
#294> Crafting a targeted policy would have been hard, expensive and slow.
How about simply stating that any firm paying dividends to shareholders or bonuses to execs could not have the loan forgiven? It wouldn't be perfect but it'd cut out the most egregious snakes. Hindsight yadda yadda.
The same thing happened in Australia. Cash to businesses who could show an impact by Covid, but a lot of that money went towards bonuses and dividends. Crazy.
Re: America’s Covid job-saving programme gave most of its cash to the rich
#295I know a few upper-middle class small business owners (all non-retail sectors) whose businesses weren't substantially affected by the pandemic, but who basically got a free handout as part of the program. Two mentioned how they were initially hesitant to apply for money, but then worried that if they didn't, their business could take a downturn after it was too late. Then as long as they spent the money on payroll (w…
The government can't even give our money away with a basic level of competence? This is worrisome.
Re: America’s Covid job-saving programme gave most of its cash to the rich
#296Earlier quoted context omitted.
Though to be fair you can make a very compelling argument that that wasn't the most moral choice
Avoiding a civil revolt and the subsequent death count probably undercuts any such claim to morality, if we're using "human suffering" as the metric.
Slavery apologists just keep getting more creative.
Re: America’s Covid job-saving programme gave most of its cash to the rich
#297Earlier quoted context omitted.
The answer is "people who are paid enough to do so".
Your response is smug and glib. You can make 150k without too much trouble as a plumber. Or a mason. And still they can't find people. If you can't find people to work for those wages now, you think UBI will make it better? Please do explain that to me.
There are plenty of people who might still think that's bad value. Trades put a lot of stress on your body, and are not that easy, especially masonry from what I've heard.
If you think of people working in the service sector, like fast food, or retail, I don't think most of them would cut it as a mason.
Aside from that anyone who has a way to make similar money another way would probably do so instead, I certainly would.
Re: America’s Covid job-saving programme gave most of its cash to the rich
#298I worked on a paper that showed that the "Paycheck Protection Program loans increased employment at small businesses by only 2%, implying a cost of $377,000 per job saved" in April 2020: https://opportunityinsights.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/t... It still hurts me to read. Over a third of a million, 7 times the average salary, to save a job during the pandemic under this plan
In general, a government spending program to create jobs costs 3x as much as the jobs pay.
Re: America’s Covid job-saving programme gave most of its cash to the rich
#299Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is bad to keep citing 2008 money as if it were a handout. Much of the money was paid back with interest, and the government MADE money on those loans. Look up the “maiden lane” loans for an example.
It's bad to keep countering complaints about 2008 as if the balance sheet is all that matters. The ethical complaints aren't about the money, but about the incentives and disincentives for certain behaviour, and the constant preferential treatment for a certain class of people above others. The cited reason for buying the bank debt instead of the home owner debt was "moral hazard", which actually applies to them both…
>The cited reason for buying the bank debt instead of the home owner debt was "moral hazard"
The moral hazard was the smallest of the problems. The complexity of how to do so seems like the much bigger issue. What does "buying homeowner debt" even mean when much of that debt has been securitized?
Re: America’s Covid job-saving programme gave most of its cash to the rich
#300Earlier quoted context omitted.
> This is a wealth redistribution scheme. At first order it is, but at first order virtually any policy involves moving wealth around, and at first order any such thing is zero-sum. > from people who are self-evidently efficient capital allocators to people who are self-evidently not. Given that the biggest factor affecting income is parental class, that seems far from self-evident. More importantly, if we want to en…
> Given that the biggest factor affecting income is parental class This isn't actually true; it's one possible explanation that seems OK under cursory examination of the evidence, and it's compatible with American university social "science" dogma, but it falls apart under careful inspection. The overwhelmingly more likely (but incompatible with field political dogma) explanation is that income is most strongly media…
> This persists through adoption; try to explain that as a socially mediated effect.
(Formal, registered) adoption is virtually impossible for lower-class people, so studies have very little coverage of that.
> Now, that said, this has nothing to do with the fact that people who would most benefit from welfare schemes are the least likely to be efficient capital allocators. We can make the observation that they are not allocating efficiently independently from asking why they are not allocating efficiently.
But we can't even begin to talk about capital allocation if we're only looking at the output side and not the input side. The people who would benefit most from UBI would be mostly those who have seen little benefit from capital yes, but the overwhelming majority of those are people who never had much capital to allocate in the first place.
> The market already efficiently addresses situations like this which actually exist, using schemes like business loans and outside investment.
Access to those things is extremely class-gated.
> You've made the same (understandable) inversion of causality as before. In reality, the latter tends to drive the former. Obviously the causality is bidirectional to some degree, but I think people tend to vastly underweight the primary direction.
There are probably real effects in both directions, but there is certainly a significant difference from having a safety net. E.g. see the bump in people starting businesses once they hit the medicaid eligibility age threshold.
> There is no way in hell some financial knob the government can blindly turn would do as good a job at performing this function as banks and investors who are actually making a conscious decision and putting their own money on the line.
> I agree that society could do a better job enabling outsized performers without means to get access to capital, but we already do a pretty good job and there is no way that some simple welfare system would do a better job than the intentional systems we have now.
Maybe. Simplicity, transparency, and reliability can be a real gamechanger. At one point in the pandemic the government was trying to literally give away money to certain categories of small businesses but found it difficult, because the businesses that most needed the support were also those that were least efficient at navigating bureaucracies and processes. For an older example, Ramanujan won a scholarship to an elite school that was intended precisely to support cases like his (intelligent people from poor backgrounds), but lost it because, despite his mathematical brilliance, his grades in other subjects weren't high enough to meet the requirements.
> This may or may not be true (I'm not much of a historian), but I do know that "some level of support" doesn't mean "far-reaching government welfare infrastructure". It can mean churches, waqfs, and so on.
Sure. But that style of non-guaranteed social support increases the pressure on poor people to live in a conventional, legible fashion, avoid downside risks, and conform. We gain little and lose much from encouraging the poor to be (literally and metaphorically) sober and miserable because it would be not costly but merely unseemly to enjoy themselves (especially - though far from only - when that enjoyable thing is potentially productive, but in a way that's not necessarily understandable to those in charge of that welfare infrastructure).