“Economic Injustice”: 72% Of PPP Money Went To The Top 20% Of Earners In America

The idea of the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) was criticized early on by many in the Austrian school, like Peter Schiff, who immediately pointed out that everybody – whether they needed it or not – would be applying for the funding, that the government had no way to track where all of it was going, and that waste, fraud and abuse within the program would be rampant.

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Cut to just about 2 years later and the New York Times has just published stunning statistics about where the $800 billion in PPP loans wound up.

The Times’ analysis found that only about 25% of the money went to businesses that would have otherwise lost it:

One new analysis found that only about a quarter of the money spent by the program paid wages that would have otherwise been lost, partly because the government steadily loosened the rules for how businesses could use the money as the pandemic dragged on.

The article wrote that “the looser rules meant the Paycheck Protection Program ended up subsidizing business owners more than their workers” and reported that “for every $1 in wages that [the PPP program] prevented from being lost, it handed out $3.13 that went somewhere else”. – READ MORE