While publicly traded corporations received more than $1 billion from the program Senator Collins co-authored, Maine small businesses still struggle to access funds

 

The program that Senator Susan Collins promised would help keep small businesses afloat through the coronavirus crisis is receiving poor marks from voters across the country and small business owners in Maine. 

 

According to a new poll from Morning Consult, voters think the Paycheck Protection Program funds were not distributed fairly by a two-to-one margin -- including 45% of independents and 36% of Republicans. This polling comes after extensive reporting revealed that large corporations have received more than $1 billion from the program and big banks have given preferential treatment to their wealthiest clients when distributing PPP funds. 

 

Meanwhile, small businesses in Maine continue to sound the alarm about “mind boggling” problems with the PPP. Even some small businesses who have been able to get loans through the program have found that it has done “very little to actually help the business” and is “not effective for businesses that are closed or not operating at full capacity” which includes many small businesses in Maine’s tourism and hospitality industries.

 

Morning Consult: Small-Business Lending Program Gets Poor Marks From Voters

 

By Claire Williams

May 6, 2020

 

Key Points:

 

  • Banks and businesses have rushed to grab a piece of the Small Business Administration’s Paycheck Protection Program set up to provide coronavirus-related financial assistance, including several publicly traded companies

 

  • Some of those larger businesses have since returned their funding under pressure, but new polling shows that a plurality of voters still think the loans from the program have been awarded unfairly.

 

  • The small-business lending program has been criticized by both sides of the aisle for allocating funds to publicly traded companies and large restaurant and hotel chains instead of mom-and-pop shops, and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has asked that those big companies return the money. 

 

  • Voters, however, still believe that the small-business loans have gone unjustifiably to large, publicly traded companies.

 

  • Forty-four percent of registered voters surveyed in the Morning Consult/Politico poll said the loans have been awarded unfairly, while 20 percent said that the loans have been distributed fairly with the intent of preserving jobs and mitigating the country’s economic situation. 

 

  • The survey was conducted May 2-3 among 1,987 registered voters and has a margin of error of 2 percentage points. 

 

  • Democrats were the most likely to say that the loans are being given out unfairly at 50 percent, followed by independents at 45 percent. Republicans were the least likely to think of the lending program as unfair (at 36 percent), but still chose that option at a wide margin over thinking the loans were fair at 28 percent.

 

  • In particular, voters were critical of publicly traded companies in the small-business lending program. 

 

  • Forty-four percent of voters said publicly traded companies that spent their cash on hand before the coronavirus pandemic in order to return profits to investors should have saved that money and shouldn’t be eligible for governmental financial support. Nineteen percent said that those companies should still be able to receive the loans, and 38 percent didn’t know or had no opinion. 

 

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