yes, you may "hire" a new employee and they are eligible to receive compensation that the gov will forgive to you.  the max to my understanding would be 100k annualized over an 8 week period so around $16,666.  very creative.

you can only count "employees" whom you contribute payroll taxes for.  I tried to add an independent contractor who does five figures a month in IT work for me, and it was vetoed.    It looks like the focus is maintaining quantifiable JOBS, but not necessarily incomes.  

 
I still enjoyed your joke.  

people are really getting paid $37 a barrel to take oil.  Short oil, and I wrote about this before (a few weeks ago), but wowzas oil actually has a negative value.  No demand and producers are paying you to take it.  Expected sub-$20.  Damn.  

And the gubment is quantifying jobs by hours worked by all FICA employed during 1 of 2 time periods, chosen by employer. A Full Time Employee (FTE) is considered 30 hrs on clock; and two at 15 hrs equals 1 full time employee. So, I’m going with a 40 hr employees equals 1-1/3 FTE. I fired 2 just before the shit hit the fan, so I actually selected the “slowest” time frame for my “comparable” period. May have to hire 1 person for 8 weeks (10?) just to be able to use 75% for payroll to get the other 25% for rent and utilities.

Heard they may consider a 50/50% thing. Makes sense for restaurants and hotels that are going to p’bly need more of a ramp up period to get close to the number of FTE’s they used for the time frame used to get their “comparable period”. The gubment didn’t exactly share the procedure for determining “forgiveness” until after companies applied. I suspect people are going to get paid for making sail boat fuel!