The Senate has approved more than $3 billion dollars for the Payment Protection Plan to help businesses recover during this pandemic.
“The paycheck protection plan has provided enormous relief to small businesses in Texas and across the country. The number one state that is the recipient of paycheck protection funds is the state of Texas,” said Texas Senator Ted Cruz in an interview with NBC 5.
The plan ran out of money, and some small business owners were left empty-handed, while other larger companies got help.
Senator Cruz says the intention of the program is to help small business with 500 employees and fewer. He acknowledged some recipients were undeserving.
“We just added an additional $310 billion dollars to the program, so that the funds are available there to try to help small businesses. But look, at the same time, I will recognize that rolling out any program this massive, trillions of dollars from the federal government, there is going to be bureaucratic delays, there is going to be bumps in the road. But the objective here, and it was a bi-partisan objective, this passed unanimously in the United States Senate, the objective is to get essential and needed relief to small businesses on the ground,” said Senator Cruz.
Senator Cruz is on the president’s advisory committee to re-open the economy. He says Texans are ready to get back to work.
“We have two simultaneous national crises. We have a public health pandemic, the coranvirus pandemic, and then we have at the same time an economic catastrophe. Twenty-two million Americans have lost their jobs in the last four weeks. Millions of small businesses are at risk of going under and we cannot continue shutting down our economy indefinitely,” said Senator Cruz.
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Cruz says re-opening the economy will vary geographically and will be a gradual process.
We asked Senator Cruz if he thinks re-opening counties like Dallas, Tarrant and Harris, which have a high number of cases, will be different than other counties.
“I think unquestionably. If you look at where the incidents of this virus is, dense urban areas have had a much tougher time of it. That having people really closely concentrated on top of each other, the risks are higher. And so each county, each local government is going to have to assess what is the rate of infections, what is the rate of transmission, what is the rate of fatalities, what is the condition of the hospitals and health network to care for those. But that being said, we can also move towards allowing people to begin opening the doors, begin generating revenue for their families, while protecting against transmission of the virus,” said Senator Cruz.
