Two years into COVID, was US$800b payroll aid plan worth it? -
Levin - 10-03-2022
By JOSH BOAK
2 hours ago
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an outside study suggests that the program — commonly known as PPP — was troublingly expensive per job saved and the payments mostly benefitted business owners who were best prepared to weather the pandemic. On the whole, the study implies that just 23% to 34% of PPP dollars went to workers who would have lost jobs, at a cost of as much as US$258,000 per job retained.
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Across two presidencies, Congress approved an unprecedented
US$5.8 trillion in relief spending
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The U.S. never developed the data systems to monitor what was happening to individual businesses’ payrolls, unlike in Canada, the Scandinavian region, Portugal and Brazil. Those systems would have made it easier to allocate money based on genuine need during a downturn. The U.S. failed to invest in its own data resources and could not target the aid as a result.
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Just 4.3% of total U.S. household wealth belongs to Black Americans and
2.5% to Hispanic Americans, significantly below their share of the total U.S. population.
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the richest 20% of households captured about 85% benefits of the program.
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"It’s not that PPP did nothing; it was a life saver for some small businesses and their creditors. It was also an astoundingly large handout from future generations of U.S. taxpayers to some profitable companies".
https://apnews.com/article/biden-covid-business-health-donald-trump-79dffb001bd8e54bea69a4e1c1bb6ed4