Easy Money: An NPR Investigation

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4.6 • 59K Ratings

🗓️ 6 November 2022

⏱️ 25 minutes

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Summary

March 2020. The financial magnitude of the COVID pandemic was becoming clear. The country was facing an unprecedented economic catastrophe and Congress felt it needed to act—immediately. So it offered potentially forgivable loans to small businesses through something called the Paycheck Protection Program. The government ultimately spent almost $800 billion dollars on that effort.

NPR's Investigations correspondent Sacha Pfeiffer looked into the program and found that even after the government realized huge sums of money had gone to fraudulent borrowers and companies that may not have deserved the funding, it still forgave the vast majority of those loans. In the end, the Paycheck Protection Program basically became a federal grant program. And generations of taxpayers may wind up footing the bill.

Transcript

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0:00.0	It was March of 2020.
0:02.6	Everything from local coffee shops to major sports leagues were shutting down because of the
0:06.6	pandemic.
0:07.6	Across the country, businesses were at risk of closing down permanently.
0:12.1	People are being sent home, they're being laid off, it's unclear if or when they're going
0:15.8	to come back.
0:16.8	I mean, it was this unprecedented economic catastrophe.
0:21.5	And so the government realized we need to do something about this, or we could end up
0:25.0	with bread lines during a pandemic.
0:28.6	And the something they did was to hand out government loans to all kinds of people.
0:33.1	Tom Brady got it, Kanye West got it.
0:35.5	Sorry, wait, what?
0:36.5	Yes, Tom Brady and Kanye West got these government loans.
0:41.2	This is up for Sunday, I'm Rachel Martin.
0:43.1	Today, NPR investigations correspondent Sasha Fyfer tells us what went wrong when the government
0:48.9	tried to help businesses stay afloat during the pandemic.
0:52.1	They created this thing called the Paycheck Protection Program.
0:55.0	And this Sasha was for all those businesses who were panicked about their future rate.
0:58.6	It was for businesses with no more than 500 employees.
1:01.3	It was supposed to help small businesses and they could apply for up to $10 million in
1:05.2	loans that would be potentially forgivable.
1:08.1	Wow.
	...

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