Rolling Stone: America Is Living Paycheck to Paycheck – On Purpose

The Trump administration blew $349 billion in small-business pandemic aid in four weeks, less time than it took for me to grow out my quarantine beard. That is nothing to be proud of, but President Trump still took his victory lap on Tuesday, boasting about breaking speed records for loans like it was an Olympic sport.

It has been only four weeks since Donald Trump signed the Small Business Administration’s PPP into law, and now he is getting $320 billion more to dole out to businesses that presumably are not the Los Angeles Lakers. That total will include at least $60 billion reserved, he said on Tuesday, “for community banking institutions, including those that serve minority and distressed communities…that’s African American communities, Hispanic American communities, it’s Asian American communities.”

Since the Small Business Administration only made the loans accessible through banks and its lenders, if one were a business owner without the prescience to have the right connections and credit lines before the pandemic, well, good luck staying afloat.

And the $60 billion won’t be enough, at least according to the CRL’s Director of Federal Advocacy and Senior Counsel, Ashley Harrington. She told Rolling Stone that the Small Business Administration needs a set-aside of $10 billion of new PPP funds for Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFIs) and Minority Depository Institutions (MDIs).