Will COVID-19 be the needle that finally bursts the sports bubble?

I don't get this. Seriously. Why should they feel shame?

Congress set up a program in which they indiscriminately offered businesses that met certain criteria a no-risk "loan" as long as they didn't fire anyone. Keep people on the payroll, and here is some free money.

They put the nation's commercial banks in charge of distributing the money, and despite not allocating nearly enough money to meet all the demand there was for the free money, which should have been predictable but wasn't to them, they didn't say how to pick and choose who got chosen as a winner and who got left behind as a loser.

So the banks were given a tool to reward their best customers with. The Lakers probably have a pretty strong banking relationship. And their bank chose to reward them, a reliable customer. Which was predictable.

The ONLY reason it has turned into a thing now is that there was way more demand for the free money than there was actual free money to be handed out (duh), and it turned into the inevitable shit show. So, after the fact, people started to look at who got money.

But the Lakers qualified for some free money. They were willing to abide by the terms. Why should they have felt any more shame about taking advantage of it more than anyone else would?

 

Congress didn't throw this out there and say, "This is a limited pool of money, so anyone like the Buss family, you shouldn't apply, even if your business has been shut down too."

In fact, Steve Mnuchin was out there making it sound like it would keep a good chunk of the private workforce getting paid when it was announced. And he said that they'd be right back asking Congress for more money if they ran out.

These small restaurant chains, the Lakers, some of the businesses that became a thing after the fact, weren't trying to game people, as much as you love to be outraged so you can make yourself feel like the most moral guy on the planet. They had payrolls to meet and no income coming in. And Congress was offering free money. They met the criteria. It was that simple. They didn't realize that $350 million was going to essentially be the equivalent of a couch cushion money bailout program. They were focused on their businesses. It was incumbent on the nitwits who set up the program to have realized that they were patting themselves on the back for taking care of everyone, when that amount of money was going to leave millions of small businesses in the cold.