Location: Perched on the precipice of the cauldron of truth
Posted:
Jun 12, 2023 - 10:53am
black321 wrote:
That view might apply to the initial stimulus (PPP, Main st lending, TALF...) issued early in Mar, Apr 2020, but you then had the late 2020 through 2022 spending that allowed plenty of time for proper oversight, and there wasnt. The effect was $ out the window...and where did it go? Retail sales, home remodeling, and then ultimately travel. There is still over $500B in excess savings (at this point, held by the more well off upper percentile). There was the theft and there was the wasteful spending, sending checks to households that didnt need it, rampant unemployment scams (word spread quick among college students that all you needed to do was apply and they'd send you checks, even going back to Mar 2020)... No, they had plenty of time to drop the shotgun and pick up the rifle to take better aim.
Just as an exercise, can you think of any reason this might have been seen as desirable? A feature not a bug?
the intentions might have been good, but the results were not.
brushing off the incompetence off as just a cost of doing business is pretty lazy.
1%-2% loss might be acceptable, but not what occurred during Covid...especially when we could have used those funds to address many of our current issues from pollution, to immigration, to education. And then there was the plain inappropriate distributions.
That was a failure, from the gov to the citizens who abused the system.
An Associated Press analysis found that fraudsters potentially stole more than $280 billion in COVID-19 relief funding; another $123 billion was wasted or misspent. Combined, the loss represents 10% of the $4.2 trillion the U.S. government has so far disbursed in COVID relief aid.
while I agree this sucks, anytime you have a large scale government effort like this there will be waste and fraud. You can minimize it if you spend a lot of time on oversight and verification. But in this situation speed was imperative to keep a lot of small businesses afloat and that mechanism was used to keep a lot of households solvent as well (money was paid to businesses to keep people on payroll instead of sending them to unemployment). So 10-15% actually seems pretty good to me. It's just that it was a huge program, so 10-15% is Billions and that number seems scary. The GDP is ~ 25 Trillion dollars. The numbers at this scale are so big it's hard to tell what's important.
That view might apply to the initial stimulus (PPP, Main st lending, TALF...) issued early in Mar, Apr 2020, but you then had the late 2020 through 2022 spending that allowed plenty of time for proper oversight, and there wasnt. The effect was $ out the window...and where did it go? Retail sales, home remodeling, and then ultimately travel. There is still over $500B in excess savings (at this point, held by the more well off upper percentile). There was the theft and there was the wasteful spending, sending checks to households that didnt need it, rampant unemployment scams (word spread quick among college students that all you needed to do was apply and they'd send you checks, even going back to Mar 2020)... No, they had plenty of time to drop the shotgun and pick up the rifle to take better aim.
Location: Perched on the precipice of the cauldron of truth
Posted:
Jun 12, 2023 - 7:55am
islander wrote:
FTA:
An Associated Press analysis found that fraudsters potentially stole more than $280 billion in COVID-19 relief funding; another $123 billion was wasted or misspent. Combined, the loss represents 10% of the $4.2 trillion the U.S. government has so far disbursed in COVID relief aid.
while I agree this sucks, anytime you have a large scale government effort like this there will be waste and fraud. You can minimize it if you spend a lot of time on oversight and verification. But in this situation speed was imperative to keep a lot of small businesses afloat and that mechanism was used to keep a lot of households solvent as well (money was paid to businesses to keep people on payroll instead of sending them to unemployment). So 10-15% actually seems pretty good to me. It's just that it was a huge program, so 10-15% is Billions and that number seems scary. The GDP is ~ 25 Trillion dollars. The numbers at this scale are so big it's hard to tell what's important.
An Associated Press analysis found that fraudsters potentially stole more than $280 billion in COVID-19 relief funding; another $123 billion was wasted or misspent. Combined, the loss represents 10% of the $4.2 trillion the U.S. government has so far disbursed in COVID relief aid.
while I agree this sucks, anytime you have a large scale government effort like this there will be waste and fraud. You can minimize it if you spend a lot of time on oversight and verification. But in this situation speed was imperative to keep a lot of small businesses afloat and that mechanism was used to keep a lot of households solvent as well (money was paid to businesses to keep people on payroll instead of sending them to unemployment). So 10-15% actually seems pretty good to me. It's just that it was a huge program, so 10-15% is Billions and that number seems scary. The GDP is ~ 25 Trillion dollars. The numbers at this scale are so big it's hard to tell what's important.
David Wallace-Wells: Three years ago, in March 2020, you and many others warned that Covid could result in as many as 100,000 or 200,000 American deaths, making the case for quite drastic interventions in the way we lived our daily lives. At the time, you thought âworst-case scenariosâ of more than a million deaths were quite unlikely. Now here we are, three years later, and, having done quite a lot to try to stop the spread of the virus, we have passed 1.1 million deaths. What went wrong?
Anthony Fauci: Something clearly went wrong. And I donât know exactly what it was. But the reason we know it went wrong is that we are the richest country in the world, and on a per-capita basis weâve done worse than virtually all other countries.1 And thereâs no reason that a rich country like ours has to have 1.1 million deaths. Unacceptable.
It never bothered me, just puzzled me sometimes. I've accidentally left a mask on a few times and started driving, but realized it once my glasses started fogging up - which isn't good while driving.
that was the only irritation i had when wearing a mask.
I've done it. Short trip, can't be arsed to take it off, put it someplace, put it back on. I mean wearing a mask was no big deal so I don't know why seeing someone wear one when it wasn't strictly needed.would bother people
It never really bothered me, just puzzled me sometimes - like on highways or "outside-of-town" roads. I've accidentally left a mask on a few times and started driving, but realized it once my glasses started fogging up - which isn't especially desirable while driving.
...and if you had a seatbelt that easily snapped off when you left the car, then snapped back on...you would see a lot of folks walking around with seatbelts on.
I've done it. Short trip, can't be arsed to take it off, put it someplace, put it back on. I mean wearing a mask was no big deal so I don't know why seeing someone wear one when it wasn't strictly needed.would bother people
yeah. i live relatively close to 2 places i have to run errands to that are less than 2 minutes from each other. i've put it on when i left my house, stopped for first errand, got back in the car, stopped for second errand then got back in the car for home.
It was odd seeing people do that so often - puzzling really. I still see it sometimes. Maybe some people just forget about it or something.
I've done it. Short trip, can't be arsed to take it off, put it someplace, put it back on. I mean wearing a mask was no big deal so I don't know why seeing someone wear one when it wasn't strictly needed.would bother people
