Don’t Mock the Payroll Protection Program
Baked into this critique is another implication: the PPP was a giveaway to the rich while canceling student loans will benefit working and middle-class individuals. By highlighting how large some of the PPP loans were, Democrats are denigrating the 2020 program and making it plausible for left-leaning voters and institutions to mock the concept of blanket pandemic relief. Downstream from the White House messaging, one recent viral political cartoon conflated PPP-loan forgiveness with “billionaire tax breaks” and “corporate subsidies.”
The Biden White House is consciously — or unconsciously — creating a dangerous and misleading narrative on the left that may undercut future disaster-aid efforts. Student loans should be forgiven, but they were not designed to be; PPP loans very much were. It is better to conceive of the PPP loans as a mass bailout absent means-testing, the type that cried out for far more federal oversight but may have saved the country. Despite the program’s waste and lack of focus, many deserving workers and businesses still managed to benefit.
It is ironic, in some sense, that it’s only the Republicans defending the $800 billion Payroll Protection Program passed in the earliest weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic (with strong support from House Democrats and Senate Republicans alike). At the time, the economy was teetering on the brink of a second Great Depression. Schools were closing, and city centers were emptying out. Restaurants, bars, gyms, hotels, and movie theaters were shuttered indefinitely. Business shutdowns never witnessed in modern times were underway.
In such dire circumstances, Congress had to act quickly. The PPP, signed into law by President Donald Trump, was designed to pump cash at a rapid clip into as many businesses in need as possible. The goal was simple: Prevent mass layoffs.
Acting in such haste, lawmakers created a bailout fund that was easily exploited by nefarious actors. Two-thirds of the $800 billion ended up in the hands of business owners and shareholders. A postal-service employee received an $82,900 loan for a business called “U.S. Postal Services.” A man in Georgia spent $57,000 in PPP loans on a rare Pokémon card. And Tom Brady’s company took out an enormous PPP loan of almost $1 million, feeding into the perception that the ultrawealthy were getting fat off of pandemic aid.
