Tom Brady bought a yacht

@AverageJoe1 said
But Suzanne, hold on, who I think they are is quite irrelevant. Some people do work harder than others. Go to any location where more than two people are working, and one of them will be working harder than the other, and you are right , I would not know who they are

Debates on forum are just not debates.

The ones who work the hardest are those who are paid the least.

At least try to pretend to have the thinnest shred of empathy.

@Suzianne said
The ones who work the hardest are those who are paid the least.

At least try to pretend to have the thinnest shred of empathy.

That one may have empathy or not, does not affect or change the fact that your statement makes no sense.
Could you write it in adult terms so that we might be able to debate it. I do not understand what it means. I know a guy that works harder than another guy and he makes more money than the other guy. So your statement makes no sense

@no1marauder said
Your article talks about the majority of benefits going to households with yearly incomes over $144,000. You've somehow twisted that into benefiting the "super wealthy". I suggest you actually look at some Census data.

Even if I agreed with the methodology, obviously preventing a business from shuttering its doors is going to benefit shareholders and owners in monetary ...[text shortened]... g down would have been a "good" thing for the economy during COVID (or at any time for that matter).

Mostly, it stopped the stock market from tanking, which only helped the wealthy. How many dollars did it cost taxpayers to save 1 job for 1 month?

@wildgrass said
Mostly, it stopped the stock market from tanking, which only helped the wealthy. How many dollars did it cost taxpayers to save 1 job for 1 month?

The study cited in the Economist article you gave says this:

"Our best evidence is about 2.97 million jobs per week were preserved by the Paycheck Protection Program in the second quarter of 2020, and 1.75 million jobs per week were preserved in the fourth quarter."

https://shapingwork.mit.edu/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/jep.36.2.55.pdf p. 64

It then admits that this understates the effect for technical reasons concerning smaller firms and comes up with a figure of 3 million job years saved. p. 66

The study then says "Ultimately, permanent business closures proved less pervasive than many had anticipated at the pandemic's outset. The Paycheck Protection Program may be part of the reason." p. 69

I have cited to other economic studies which have indicated a more robust effect on both employment and avoidance of business closures. But even your preferred source shows a significant saving of jobs and this doesn't even take into account the multiplier effect that loss of income from those additional layoffs would have had on overall economic activity.

@wildgrass said
Aww man. If only I had started a one man LLC and declared myself it's only employee, I would have received a $20,000 check from Uncle Sam that I could use for payroll i.e. myself.

Well, you have to have had a certain level of self-employment income, so it's not quite that simple.

@no1marauder said
Check out the thread's title.

A corporation Tom Brady had some unclear ownership stake in received a $960,000 PPP loan that was to be used to cover payroll costs in April 2020.

8 months later Tom Brady traded in his $2 million yacht for a $6 million dollar one. His NFL salary that year was $37 million.

I asked for some evidence PPP funds were used for the yacht ...[text shortened]... panies and wealthier individuals benefiting from the program who were never intended to by Congress.

Ah, okay. So the TB yacht angle is nonsense.

Of course, it's almost impossible that a huge federal program like that is not going to be abused to some extent.

@sh76 said
Well, you have to have had a certain level of self-employment income, so it's not quite that simple.

I don't really do debates by anecdotes.

Still, a program that recognized businesses of even just one self-employed person would suffer economic damage because of the pandemic doesn't sound ridiculous to me. And there was little time to mitigate such damage making specific targeting of the most needy firms impracticable and counter to the most important goal of the program.

@sh76 said
Well, you have to have had a certain level of self-employment income, so it's not quite that simple.

I don't knock the idea, only the implementation. It's unclear whether your job counts as a job "saved" using no1marauder's algorithm.

@no1marauder said
The study cited in the Economist article you gave says this:

"Our best evidence is about 2.97 million jobs per week were preserved by the Paycheck Protection Program in the second quarter of 2020, and 1.75 million jobs per week were preserved in the fourth quarter."

https://shapingwork.mit.edu/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/jep.36.2.55.pdf p. 64

It then admi ...[text shortened]... ffect that loss of income from those additional layoffs would have had on overall economic activity.

Read down just a little bit further...

... at a cost of $258,000 per job-year saved (that is, $510 billion/1.98 million). We assume that actual employee compensation for each saved job averaged $58,200 .... on average, total compensation is 42 percent larger than wages according to BLS Employer Costs for Employee Compensation data ($786 × 52 × 1.42). The 1.98 million job-years saved then imply that $115 billion in PPP loans ($58,200 × 1.98 million) accrued to employee paychecks. 66-77% accrued to owners and corporate stakeholders

So, for every $1 that ended up in the pocket of a middle class worker whose job was saved, so he/she could pay their mortgage, ~$4 went to their boss.

I don't trust their optimistic math regarding "preserved jobs", either, mate. You mention small businesses and paying the mortgage a lot but ignore that the small businesses received smaller payouts compared to the big businesses. There is a false assumption that all employees presumed to be "preserved" would have otherwise lost their jobs. I don't buy it.

Tom Brady aside, 10s of millions of dollars were sent from the PPP to Amazon's service providers. Are these considered "small businesses"? Presumably these are jobs that did not need to be saved, and any blip in employment was probably just because there were no ships at port for a month or two.

It seems like nothing more than a corporate slush fund for massive companies to retain their market share, and prevent the stock market from tanking.

@sh76 said
Ah, okay. So the TB yacht angle is nonsense.

Of course, it's almost impossible that a huge federal program like that is not going to be abused to some extent.

Not nonsense at all. If I got the $20k that you got, maybe I remodel a bathroom. It's not unreasonable to say that PPP paid for it.

@wildgrass said
Not nonsense at all. If I got the $20k that you got, maybe I remodel a bathroom. It's not unreasonable to say that PPP paid for it.

Ignoring for a minute that you've completely failed to show Tom Brady personally received a penny of PPP funds, your argument remains a crock.

I, like most other Americans, received a COVID related payment in April, 2020.
In December, I brought a pair of shoelaces. Did the government pay for them?

And what the heck, your claim doesn't suggest any temporal limit, so I guess the government paid for the shoelaces I brought last week, too.

@no1marauder said
Ignoring for a minute that you've completely failed to show Tom Brady personally received a penny of PPP funds, your argument remains a crock.

I, like most other Americans, received a COVID related payment in April, 2020.
In December, I brought a pair of shoelaces. Did the government pay for them?

And what the heck, your claim doesn't suggest any temporal limit, so I guess the government paid for the shoelaces I brought last week, too.

Wildass is just following the dem lib narrative to attack straight white men…Dave portnoy explains it pretty well

@no1marauder said
Ignoring for a minute that you've completely failed to show Tom Brady personally received a penny of PPP funds, your argument remains a crock.

I, like most other Americans, received a COVID related payment in April, 2020.
In December, I brought a pair of shoelaces. Did the government pay for them?

And what the heck, your claim doesn't suggest any temporal limit, so I guess the government paid for the shoelaces I brought last week, too.

What's this about a suggestion of a temporal limit? I don't know what you are talking about.

But yah, well that COVID stimulus (as opposed to PPP) was designed to do exactly what you say, get consumers to buy stuff. You bought shoelaces, compared to Tom Brady who bought a yacht. Both good things but Brady got more. A government handout in both respects.

The rich get richer, the beat goes on, and you for some reason are defending this. More than 600 companies received checks totaling $10 million each. Every voter and taxpayer should be appalled.

More than half the money went to large businesses. More than 100 checks were sent to businesses with no name. As was mentioned in a prior post, the pennies that trickled down to the employee were 3-4X lower than what employers and investors got.

Keep in mind, too, that it took months of litigation and many hard working progressively-minded volunteers just in order to get the government to tell us who we (the taxpayer) gave these handouts too. They would have preferred to grift off the government with no knowledge precipitated to the taxpayer.

@Mott-The-Hoople said
Wildass is just following the dem lib narrative to attack straight white men…Dave portnoy explains it pretty well

Oh good lord, Mott. Stop obsessing about race and gender again. I'm sure you can find some hispanics or whatever on the list to fit your preferred narrative. Frankly I don't care that Tom is white and male. Just because a lot of government cheese was given free of charge to straight white men doesn't give you the right to obsess about gender again.

Kayleigh McEnany, WH press secretary, and her family got $2 million from PPP. She's a girl but I didn't look up what she bought with her free money. Is that a better example?

@wildgrass said
What's this about a suggestion of a temporal limit? I don't know what you are talking about.

But yah, well that COVID stimulus (as opposed to PPP) was designed to do exactly what you say, get consumers to buy stuff. You bought shoelaces, compared to Tom Brady who bought a yacht. Both good things but Brady got more. A government handout in both respects.

The rich get r ...[text shortened]... They would have preferred to grift of the government with no knowledge precipitated to the taxpayer.

You're really sufficiently economically ignorant to think that money received in April is used to make purchases 8 months later?

Dictionaries are available online; "temporal" is in them and you really need to learn what it means.

When I have time, I'll debunk the points raised in your longer earlier posts even more so then I already have. But your characterization of a program targeted towards small business has a giveaway to the superwealthy is utter nonsense.