Political Quotes

“Reserving the right to object, let me first begin by saying that this is the first time I had a chance to speak on the floor about the Paycheck Protection Program since it passed. I want to say this unequivocally. Despite everything you read out there, in my mind, I don't think there is any question that by far this has been the most successful part of the CARES Act. To put it in perspective, this was something we worked on in a bipartisan way. In less than a week, it was crafted, and then the agencies had less than 6 days to put together the rules. Until Friday, April 4, no bank in America had ever made a PPP loan; no one had ever applied for one; and the SBA had never approved one. It was a massive program. We looked at the results. They are stunning--the results that we have seen. Does the program have problems? Sure. I think any time that you create something that spends $500 billion, $600 billion that reaches over 50 percent of the U.S. economy and put it together so quickly, there are going to be unintended consequences. I will come back to that point in a moment. I think the biggest problem this program has had from the very beginning, which created some of these tensions that we read about in the press, is that it was underfunded from the very beginning. I mean, the demand was greater than the supply, even potentially right now after the second round. We have heard the reports about publicly traded companies.…”