Biden insists too few stimulus $$$ have aided small businesses

By Scott Benjamin

Fox News media analyst Howard Kurtz recently wrote that four years ago the political pundits dismissed Donald Trump's chances of getting the Republican presidential nomination and three months ago they did the same regarding Joe Biden's campaign for the Democratic nod.

A lot of them got it wrong, just as they did when they kept saying that Mitt Romney was going to fade and every two months there was a new front-runner - Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum - in 2012; just as they thought Howard Dean was going to gallop to the Democratic nomination in 2004.

Wall Street Journal columnist Gerald Seib predicts that the United States is "headed toward a coronavirus election."

"The virus crisis and its economic aftershocks not only consume the country today, but are making the question of how President Trump handles them the defining campaign issue," he wrote recently. "An election that always was destined to be a referendum on the incumbent will be even more so."

During a virtual roundtable in western Wisconsin on May 20, Biden, the apparent Democratic presidential nominee, criticized the president's handling of the funds approved in March for the $2.2 trillion CARES program, which provided stimulus to individuals and businesses.

Biden, the former vice president, declared that "40 percent of the funding" for the Paycheck Protection Program - which was approved in March and received supplemental funds in April - "did not go to small businesses."

He said that small businesses "hire more people than all those corporations combined."

Biden said that as vice president under former Democratic President Barack Obama he supervised the dispersal of funds from the $787 billion stimulus that was signed in February 2009 following the financial crisis. He said there "was less than 0.2 percent fraud," and the program produced "75 consecutive months of job growth."

In April, Biden told Politico.com that there would have to be a considerable amount of stimulus beyond the CARES Act to allow America to recover economically.

At the roundtable, the former vice president said steps need to be taken "to keep the lights on. . . Bankruptcies are real."

Economics columnist Derek Thompson wrote recently in The Atlantic that it would take a combined $10 trillion in stimulus to avert a depression.

The New York Times reported May 22 that Federal Reserve Board Vice Chairman Richard Clarida said that "additional support from both monetary and fiscal policies may be called for."

However, Larry Kudlow of Redding, the director of the National Economic Council, said May 10 on ABC News' "This Week" that the White House is "collecting ideas" and probably will not decide until at least June when or whether there will be additional stimulus.

The roundtable was moderated by U.S. Rep. Ron Kind (D-WI), the chief Democratic Whip, and included three Wisconsin residents who discussed obstacles that they have encountered during the pandemic.

Biden- who noted that his home state, Delaware, is mostly rural and suburban with the largest city only having a population of just over 70,000 - added that the White House's tariff wars with China have hurt farmers across the country.

U.S. Rep. Jahana Hayes (D-5) of Wolcott told Patch.com last August that Trump's "erratic" trade policies were forcing dairy farms to close in her district.

The New York Times reported last August that Trump ordered American companies out of the China because of the skirmishes on tariffs and three days later "he was positive he would get a trade deal."

"There is no policy," Hayes, a member of the U.S. House Agriculture Committee ,said at that time. "You can't trust the president's words."

However, Trump did garner considerable support recently for the proposed United States Mexico Canada Agreement trade pact, which was approved in the Democratic-controlled U.S. House. That was considered, by some, to be an improvement over the negotiations by the Obama Administration for the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership - which would have included 13 countries encompassing nearly 40 percent of the global economy- which never got to a vote in Congress.

Biden said the president has not done enough during the pandemic to get funds to food banks across the country.

"They help people who don't have a meal," he said, noting that in some instances restaurants could buy and prepare meals that were delivered to needy people.

The former vice president said he also supports investing "$20 billion" in rural broadband to enhance economic and technology opportunities.

On a separate topic, Biden bristled over the president's recent firing of inspector generals Steve Linick at the State Department and Michael Atkinson at the U.S. Intelligence Community.

"Why is that?" he said. "Who is looking over anybody's shoulder?"

"The nation needs nonpartisan inspector generals," Biden added. "They are the sunshine that democracy needs."

The Wall Street Journal reported that on May 18, Trump told reporters, "I think we've been treated very unfairly by inspector generals."