by BRIAHNA JOY GRAY
To be indebted means to lack freedom. That’s why elites melt down in response to Biden’s new plan to forgive $10k of student debt. They don’t want you to be free.
Elites love certain government handouts for the rich.
Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul Pelosi, trended recently on Twitter after pleading guilty to drunk driving. Many people have scrutinized how this case was handled to see if he received any preferential treatment, which is understandable. We all know that we live in a world in which the rich and powerful get to play by different rules than everyone else. Now, it seems like Pelosi’s case was treated normally. But while everyone was focused on the Paul Pelosi drunk driving case, the real Pelosi corruption story was not in the West Coast vineyards where he was arrested, but back east. In the swamp.
Multimillionaire Paul Pelosi benefited from one of the $12 million Paycheck Protection Program loans that were issued in 2021. And he won’t be paying back a dime. Pelosi owns an 8 percent share in a restaurant-based company called EDI, which will not have to repay two loans worth a total of $1.7 million. Both loans were completely forgiven, along with loans taken out by such notable small business owners as Khloe Kardashian, Tom Brady, and Reese Witherspoon.
And that’s not all. According to analysis by NBC, 25 loans valued at $4 million went to businesses and properties owned and rented out by the Trump Organization and Trump son in law Jared Kushner. And even though PPP money was supposed to go to making sure people were able to keep their jobs through the COVID lockdowns, fifteen of the Trump-related properties that received loans said they retained one job, at most. And that’s if they reported numbers at all.
Meanwhile, most small business owners saw little to no benefit.
One percent of PPP borrowers got over one-quarter of the loan money. And, according to a study by economists in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, only about 25 percent of PPP funds went to workers that would’ve lost their jobs. The rest, despite the attempt of pundits like Ben Shapiro to insist that recipients were just paying their workers, went to business owners, shareholders, creditors and the like.
Now, if you’re wondering when we, as a political community, debated the standards for PPP forgiveness—how companies should prove they used their PPP to actually retain workers, and whether PPP should be means tested to keep people like Billionaires Jay-Z and Kanye from benefiting—the answer is: we never did. As is often the case with policies intended to bail out the reckless elites that exacerbated the supply chain crisis by moving jobs overseas for cheap labor, or who caused the housing crisis by gambling with our mortgages, there was no public conversation about their fiscal responsibility.
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