Amara Omeokwe
speaker
439 appearances
11 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2020
last heard Dec 2023
Amara Omeokwe’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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So I'm going to caveat my answer by saying that these negotiations are ongoing and seemingly ever evolving.
But lawmakers generally agree on a bipartisan basis that small businesses need more aid and that they should get more aid.
So there is a bipartisan proposal that is out there right now that would direct about $300 billion towards small businesses in the next coronavirus package.
And lawmakers generally agree that this package of small business aid should be more targeted.
It should target smaller firms and firms that can demonstrate that the pandemic has really affected them negatively.
Well, so this bipartisan framework that is proposed would make it such that if a company wanted to take a second loan under the Paycheck Protection Program, which was the main way that the federal government offered aid to small businesses earlier this year, that company would have to have 300 or fewer employees.
And they would also have to demonstrate that they have suffered a revenue loss this year.
Now, that would be a difference from sort of the first iteration of the Paycheck Protection Program.
That program was hastily designed and put together because lawmakers really wanted to get money out to businesses quickly.
So applicants to the Paycheck Protection Program, they had to provide very little paperwork.
They pretty much only had to attest that they needed the money to support their ongoing operations.
amid economic uncertainty.
And because of those relatively few requirements, we saw a lot of businesses rush in for PPP loans when the program first opened back in April.
And you may remember that some well-known larger companies received the loans.
And then there was public backlash and those companies had to return the funds.
Right.
And so this time around, Congress is really trying to focus and kind of avoid some of those pitfalls and avoid some of the criticism that dogged the Paycheck Protection Program early on by making it much more targeted.
That really speaks to the idea of having dedicated aid for certain hard hit industries like the restaurant industry and like the live event industry, because a paycheck protection program loan amount was based on a business's monthly average payroll.
And industries like restaurants and live events have said, look, that's not a logical formula for us because we're operating at much reduced capacity.
We're not able to bring back workers at the levels that we had prior to the pandemic.
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