I don't plan on actually applying for this loan. I'm not facing "economic uncertainty" so ethically I wouldn't feel right taking money that was mean for struggling businesses.
I think that's the right thing to do. And then we should keep in mind that much of policy makers' thinking and borrower decisions were getting made back when people worried this was all a LOT worse that it turned out to be. At the start of this, widely read papers and median reports were talking about a 3% to 4% fatality rate. I think that wildly irresponsible piece, Hammer and Dance, by Tomas Pueyo, talked about 8 million to 10 million people dying in US.
Against that backdrop, people wondered not just whether they would survive but whether their small businesses would.
The more than half a million neighbors, family members and friends we've lost represent a terrible tragedy. But in the beginning, many worried we were looking at something 20X worse than what occurred.
Some controls are in place, but they're focused on the business doing fine that's applying for a couple million. No so much the small business asking for $10k.
Congress and the SBA designed this program and put certain rules in place. Their decision to forgo many of the normal financial controls in the interest of getting money to those needing it can be debated. Same with the stimulus money and unemployment programs. In the end I'm sure we'll find hundreds of billions of fraud, waste, and abuse across the trillions of dollars the government has shoveled out in the last year or so. Was that fraud, waste, and abuse worth it to get money out faster and more broadly? I'm sure economists will spend many years on that.
I think we'll find most of this money was really wasted. For what that's worth.
I also think we're going to be surprised by how large the collateral damage was here.
Final thought, which is super tangential but relevant to this subforum... I think the entrepreneurial response to all of the above is to focus on ramping up your small business. Things are getting better. Clearly, something, probably herd immunity though scientists mostly don't want to say that publicly, has massive slowed infections. The vaccines count as medical miracles and will quickly push fatalities way down...
Business owners who get going now will have a huge head start.