This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, July 2nd, 2020.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The massive outlay of cash and the Paycheck Protection Program, so-called PPP loans, went out very quickly, nearly everyone who applied

got the loan.

So what's been the impact and is there an appetite in Congress to keep the program rolling

as states begin requiring businesses to close again in

response to the coronavirus.

Cato's Diego Ziluaga comments.

Just before we started this recording, it seemed to me a little ungenerous to call what is

known as the Paycheck Protection Program or PPP it's I, ungenerous to call it a bailout.

These are extraordinary circumstances under which a lot of these loans were taken up and offered by Congress, but what would you, how would you characterize it?

The Patriot Protection Program was enacted by the CARES Act, which was legislation passed at the beginning of the pandemic

to make available funding as quickly as possible to small businesses.

It was going to go through the Small business administration and it did and these this

funding was going to be in the form of loans that however would be forgivable

so long as the small businesses that borrowed it used it to make payroll, to pay utilities, or to pay rent.

As you say, the circumstances were so exceptional as to make even a libertarian more likely to be forgiving of them and not necessarily called them a bailout.

Because at the time we didn't know how long the pandemic was going to last.

You had a lot of state governments mandating that businesses close

and at the time it would have been very difficult for small businesses that don't

have access to the capital markets and don't have

necessarily a lot of physical assets that are un mortgaged to get funding anywhere else.

...