I don’t usually talk about my family life, but I’d like to make a small exception to make a point with respect to the well-intentioned SBA program to support small businesses.
My beloved wife has a clinical practice which is the very definition of a small business. It’s a one-person shop. She had a multi-month waiting list, and plenty of clients, but that all got zeroed out with the lock-down. She had to cancel every single person, because her practice requires face to face interaction. So revenue went from great to zilch instantly.
Mercifully, we are financially secure enough that this multi-month zeroing-out of income doesn’t affect us. She’s not eligible for unemployment, because she is self-employed, but she is most certainly eligible for the PPP. However, in spite of doing all the application properly, we have heard absolutely nothing, nor, frankly, do I expect to. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to get $0.00 from the entire program. (Larry Kudlow’s third wife, on the other hand, got her money instantly, as the cocaine-addled numbskull loudly declared on public media).
It turns out that the hundreds of billions of dollars of supporting money didn’t go to truly small businesses but, instead, to huge public corporations like these shown here:
Incredible, isn’t it? These companies, any one of which you can observe in SlopeCharts, got free money from the federal government intended to help truly small businesses, exhausting the pot of cash that was intended for folks like, oh, say, my beloved wife. For no particular reason, I’ve taken the time to chart the top ten money-grubbers:
Ya know, I’ve sent a lot of tax dollars to D.C. over the years, and I’ve received dick in return. So this is the first time in my life where someone in my family was actually “owed” money for a good reason. And we’re getting nothing. But at least the CEOs paying themselves multi-million dollar salaries in the list above are going to be fine.
