News

President Biden, your student loan handout plan is the opposite of the Paycheck Protection Program
U.S. Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL)
August 26, 2022
Fox Business

When public health officials and politicians locked down the economy in March 2020,…tens of millions of Americans were headed to the unemployment line, and millions of small businesses were headed for bankruptcy. That was an unacceptable outcome, which is why I worked with Democrats and Republicans to create the Paycheck Protection Program.
 
My plan was as straightforward as it was novel: to create a federal grant for small businesses to keep their employees on payroll. This payroll grant, structured deliberately as a forgivable loan, had one key condition: that 80 percent of the funds go to payroll. While some lobbyists (and even Democratic lawmakers) in Washington begged for a blank check to small businesses, I refused. This temporary program was intended to keep employees on payroll during what we were told would be a two-week lockdown to “slow the spread.”

Two weeks turned into two months––and in some places, nearly two years. But through it all, the Paycheck Protection Program kept Main Street from going under…. All together, the Paycheck Protection Program saved 55 million jobs, with an average business size of only 20 employees, including 6.1 million jobs in my home state of Florida. That is why former Congressional Budget Office Director Doug Holtz-Eakin called it “the single most effective fiscal policy ever undertaken by the United States Government.”

…President Biden’s student debt forgiveness plan could not be more different, despite his lame attempts to draw similarities between the two. Let’s start with the obvious: federal student loans were just that, loans. The whole idea was that students would take the loans to pay for an education that would lead to a job that repays them (along with the massive interest accumulated).… 

There are plenty of valid critiques of America’s higher education cartel, which is why I introduced legislation to remove exploitative interest rates attached to federal loans. But thus far, Democrats refuse to support my LOAN Act. That is because they are beholden to the higher education industrial complex….
 
This is a handout that primarily benefits the highly educated and already well-off, the laptop liberals and Marxist misfit activists who have never run a business, made payroll, or worried about something other than what pronouns to use…. It shows where the Democrats’ priorities truly lie––and it’s not with working Americans.
 
Read the rest here.