I'm having an epically shitty week so bad that I won't ever even be able to tell anybody about it and it's put me in one of the darkest moods I've ever been in and I am utterly and entirely out of patience so if you think I'm a cranky shithead most of the time?

STRAP THE FUCK IN

“I said, ‘Oh, my God, they’re going to allow anyone to get unemployment-insurance benefits,” he recalls. “The systems are vulnerable. All you needed was a name, a date of birth, an address, and a social security number.”

Oh my god! Poor people and Democrats might be exposed to money!

the nastiest fuckin' meanest fuckin' most Republican fuckin' talking point any shithead can find puts the total fraud from PPP at ten fucking percent. Ten. Ten. Ten fucking percent. Of which thirty percent of that was "misallocated." In other words, it went to Americans? It went into the economy? But it didn't go in the way it was supposed to. And "the way it was supposed to" was really something - "hey did you make money last year? Hey, are you not making money this year? Have money."

See those? Those are pallets of cash. American greenbacks, hundos by the stack, sitting out in the middle of the Iraqi desert, waiting to disappear into the once-and-future ISIS like piss in a pool. Best guess? 363 tons of it, $40 billion in all. I had a Lyft driver once. Iraq war veteran, one leg shy. It was the LAX-to-Cypress Park run so we had a good 90 minutes to get together. It took about 20 of those for him to mention that "guarding pallets of cash" was far and away the most fucked up thing he'd ever done. It still marked him. Because it was him, and some of his buddies, standing around in the middle of the night in the middle of the desert, knowing they could walk away with life-changing amounts of money but not doing so, only to have a bunch of future ISIS troops show up the next day and haul it all away.

the whataboutism is strong with this one

Sure. But the fact of the matter is? PPP was a democratic program in which the Trump administration was absolutely positively over a barrel and NINETY FUCKING PERCENT OF IT DID WHAT IT WAS SUPPOSED TO.

I scan maybe 200 economic charts every morning. And you know what? About 50 of them have a notch in the middle. It's a notch where pick-your-metric plummets below the axis never to be seen again, then shoots back up to about where it was three months later. That notch? That notch on 50 economic charts per day? That's COVID. And it shot back up again because this country shut down its economy, hunkered down and started it right the fuck back up again and if that only cost us a trillion dollars in misallocated cash? Fuckin' GDP of the United States is 23 trillion dollars a year, a spilled trillion for saving the fucking economy isn't even a good tip.

Ben Bernanke got the name "Helicopter Ben" for this quote:

Let us suppose now that one day a helicopter flies over this community and drops an additional $1,000 in bills from the sky, which is, of course, hastily collected by members of the community. Let us suppose further that everyone is convinced that this is a unique event which will never be repeated.

Except it isn't even fuckin' Bernanke's Quote, it's Saint Friedman's. "Throw money at the proles" is the quintessential Chicago School idea and if ZOMFG ten fucking percent of it ends up "misallocated" count yourself lucky. Some dipshit rapper shooting a video called "EDD" is the system at work and his ass getting arrested is nature healing.

Fucktons of money went to rich people and that is never bitched about. These articles are always about black people who didn't deserve it and the white Republicans who are all about law and order but refuse to expand the IRS who are the guys who are actually responsible for catching this shit.

Fuck Rolling Stone in general and fuck Sean Woods in particular.