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Miami, FL — U.S. Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) joined Fox and Friends to discuss the second round of funding for the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP). See below for highlights and watch the full interview below.
On the Small Business Administration ‘pacing’ PPP applications in the second round:
“The SBA said ‘we’re going to pace it, we’re only going to process X number of applications per hour per lender’ … It’s going to slow the system down as a result of it. So it’s almost a game of ‘damned if you do, damned if you don’t.’ The program has problems, there’s no doubt about it because anything this size that happened this fast is going to have problems. But, it remains the single most successful part of the entire CARES Act.”
On some companies receiving and then returning PPP funds:
“Right now, a lot of companies that you’re reading about in the press, publicly traded and otherwise, are defined as ‘small business’ under existing SBA regulations depending on what industry they are in … Remember, this is about helping employees. It’s capped at $100,000, so no salary past $100,000 is covered, so don’t worry about Lebron getting paid through PPP or anything like that. This is about saving jobs, and ultimately we have to remember that some recipient’s name may be flashy and maybe they shouldn’t have gotten this, but the people who ultimately benefit are people making 15 or 25 dollars an hour.”
On uncertainty facing small businesses on PPP forgiveness terms and the rehire exemption:
“I don’t think for these businesses they’re going to have a problem for the most part because if you spend it on payroll or you spend it on utilities, rent, all sorts of overhead, those are allowable. And by the way, there’s also a provision, and this is what we’re really pushing hard on, the law says if you can’t hire everybody back during the time that we’ve given you because they don’t want to come back to work, because for a lot of reasons, they’re seasonal, there is a provision in the law that says that down the road you can come back in six months or whenever you have to go get forgiveness, and say I didn’t hire everybody back in 8 weeks, but I hired everybody back in 3 months and here is why it took me that long.
“So we are asking them to clarify what that’s going to look like so more businesses have confidence that this is not going to turn into a loan for them. A lot of people are having trouble re-hiring workers because the workers are saying to them ‘I’m making more on unemployment’ — not everybody, most people would prefer to have a job obviously, but that’s an issue we’re hearing reports about.”