Stimulus package part 4: Replenished relief for small business and health care
The package bolsters the depleted Paycheck Protection Program, emergency grants and loans. Here’s everything in it.
The Small Business Administration started taking requests for the replenished Paycheck Protection Program — which now houses $310 billion in emergency aid for small businesses — on Monday morning.
The system crashed an hour after it was launched due to the overwhelming number of applicants.
S.M.B. relief in the new package
The Trump administration passed this as part of a new $480 billion stimulus package last Friday. $60 billion of the $310 billion for small business relief has been earmarked for littler lending facilities, such as “community financial institutions, small insured depository institutions and credit unions with assets less than $10 billion.”
The original $350 billion small business relief fund ran out of money in a span of fewer than two weeks. A major reason that the fund ran out was that some large restaurant chains were also taking out loans through this relief fund — Potbelly’s, Ruth’s Chris Steak House, Shake Shack (who has recently decided to return the loan from bad publicity) and Kura Sushi had received up to $20 million.
The White House has since asked bigger businesses to return funds as smaller businesses struggled to get a loan approved.
The new bill also provides $10 billion for grants under the Emergency Economic Injury Disaster Loan program, $50 billion for disaster recovery loans and $2.1 billion for additional salaries and expenses for the S.B.A.
Beyond business
The package also provides $75 billion to hospitals and health care providers to address expenses and lost revenue from the coronavirus pandemic.
And $25 billion has been issued to help facilitate and expand testing for the virus, one key facet of the eventual approval of raising social distancing measures. Of this, $11 billion will be given to states and localities “to develop, purchase, administer, process and analyze COVID-19 tests.” The remaining $14 billion is going to be used by other groups, such as federal agencies, to invest in new technologies and to help the distribution to labs.
Key critics?
Republican Senators Rand Paul and Mike Lee, who think that quarantine and lack of commerce is the true strangler of the economy — that virus bailouts have already cost too much.
“This economic calamity only resolves when we begin to re-open the economy,” Paul said.
Well, clearly they should read my other article.
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