What Happened to the Broadway Bailout?
On Friday this column noted the predictable result that after lawmakers and central bankers initiated a multitrillion-dollar flood of Covid-related cash, various observers are advancing massive estimates of the amount of money ending up in criminal hands. But its important to note that the problem with government wealth redistributions is not just that huge sums stick to undeserving fingers. Such programs can also fail to offer timely assistance to the very people they are intended to help. Take the example of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.), who has been bragging since last year about his success in engineering bailouts for the operators of entertainment venues. Yet somehow this taxpayer money doesnt seem to be reaching many of the people Mr. Schumer intended to subsidize. Ben Sisario, Stacy Cowley and Julia Jacobs recently reported in the New York Times:  As the emails finally started arriving late last week, some business owners got the good news they had been long awaiting: They would be awarded a piece of a $16 billion federal grant fund intended to preserve music clubs, theaters and other live-event businesses devastated by the pandemic. But other applicants ran into fresh obstacles  including the discovery that the government thinks theyre dead. It was the latest bureaucratic mishap for the Shuttered Venue Operators Grant initiative, an aid program created by Congress late last year that has struggled at nearly every turn to disburse badly needed relief funds. Last year Mr. Schumer warned that 90% of independent venues might die without emergency funding. Now, according to the Times, the government doesnt believe that a number of the venue operators are alive:  Bob Hansan, the managing partner of Bobby McKeys, a piano bar near Washington, received a cryptic email Tuesday afternoon that began: Your name appears on the Do Not Pay list with the Match Source DMF.  A few minutes of frantic Googling revealed that was a reference to the governments Death Master File, a record of more than 83 million people whose deaths have been reported to the Social Security Administration...  Michael Swier, the founder of the Bowery Ballroom and the Mercury Lounge in New York  and a prominent figure in the independent music world  also received notification early Wednesday that he was considered dead, and said that he was beside himself trying to understand how to correct the error. ***