These were supposed to keep at-risk companies from failing when the economy crashed, but then the economy didn't crash and instead it was just a huge government handout of free money to most companies.
I think you're putting too much weight on "did the economy crash" here. As in, "wow, the economy didn't crash, we shouldn't have done anything" aka "wow, Y2K didn't ruin everything, we shouldn't have updated all that code" or "we didn't get hacked, why did we bother applying security updates" or similar.
"We want to prevent the economy from crashing hard and long" is how I'd phrase motivations. Certain sectors did crash immediately, and yet the overall blast radius wasn't very large and a lot of stuff bounced back immediately.
That seems like a great success.
Loans being forgiven to generously even for companies that did NOT see a sustained dip in demand, on the other hand, is a more targeted specific problem, and a lesson to learn. But if you learn too broad a lesson like "stimulus is dumb" then you just drive yourself back off a difference cliff next time something exceptional happens.
A better lesson to learn is that shutting down major sectors of the economy was dumb. It was a total overreaction, and proved to be completely ineffective in controlling the pandemic. If politicians hasn't done that then there wouldn't have been a risk of an economic crash in the first place.
> If politicians hasn't done that then there wouldn't have been a risk of an economic crash in the first place.
This is naive and ignores the real sequence of events.
Things like conferences were getting canceled before the first official government actions in the US. Groceries were being hoarded. People were paying attention to events. The government sticking its head in the sand or just repeating "everything is fine, stay calm" messages wouldn't have prevented any impact.
Uncertainty is an economic killer. And if you remember early on, that uncertainty also led to a lot less controversy over the canceled events and restrictions than arose later. (Though in retrospect, even many "paranoid" estimates back then were far less than a million US deaths...)
Some level of stimulus was almost certain to be necessary regardless of official Covid actions in March 2020 unless you wanted to just let those companies and workers drown as people chose to change their behavior.
(The "restrictions should've been loosened earlier" argument is a much more reasonable one, but IMO still ignores how much of this was already local by winter of 2020, and also that at that point the initial economic damage was done.)
(That's before getting into the recklessness of assuming future severe novel diseases won't be even more deadly on limited early data...)
I don't think there's enough investigative power to find all the people who were abusing the system. The level of fraud that I personally witnessed of people filing hundreds of PPP loans for non-existent businesses was in the high 7-figure range, and that was just 2 guys I happened to hear of. There were likely hundreds of scammers doing the same thing in every major city, each stealing millions of dollars each.
It should be possible to identify these people very easily with a SQL query. To qualify, a business had to have been running for some time (years) and have payroll. So run a query for "loans issued to entities with banking history < 1y and w-2 withholding payments == 0".
Small business owners are a very powerful political force. If you are handing out checks to regular people (their employees) You basically have to give them something or they will wreck you.
These were supposed to keep at-risk companies from failing when the economy crashed, but then the economy didn't crash and instead it was just a huge government handout of free money to most companies.