Rubio’s PPP Victory Lap At Warp Speed

Might Senator Marco Rubio be forgiven for a taking victory lap for his sponsorship of PPP aka forgivable gov’t loans to small businesses, which saved millions of jobs while the country all but shut down due to Covid panic?

You’ll recall as does Rubio how critics bemoaned the $800 billion “Paycheck Protection Program’s” accompanying “waste” &/or “corruption”. Others alleged “incompetence” in administering the PPP. And they may have been right. Yet, the Senator reminds in a recent Fox op ed, the emergency program managed to send BILLIONS to honest entrepreneurial employers, who responsibly “used that money to keep their workers on payroll & even bring back furloughed or terminated employees.” Rubio concludes: “roughly 90% of the $800 billion went to legit businesses & for legit purposes.”

Mr. Rubio also counters the critics this way: “We should not forget how much worse things could have been. When state & local governments across the country began shutting down the economy, millions of small businesses & tens of millions of workers faced financial ruin … in April 2020, more than 20 million Americans lost their jobs … [but, thanks to PPP] … the economy [soon] gained [back] 2.5 million of them … Today, it’s fashionable for the media to blame PPP for fraudsters who exploited the system, but … to be effective, the program had to be implemented at a breakneck speed with the understanding strict enforcement would come after the crisis passed.” Well, not quite so fast, as Rubio also claims: “The Biden administration’s failure to verify borrowers’ information before forgiving the loans was negligent at best, criminal at worst.” Let’s see. Joe’s usual dithering aside, the senator is ok with losing 10% of $800 billion or roughly $80 billion? So, maybe he should be taking 9/10th’s of a victory lap for the otherwise “stunning [PPP] success story”?

Davd Soul