In the memorable words of television character Gomer Pyle, “Well, surprise, surprise, surprise”, the 2020 federal COVID-19-related Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) delivered nationwide by the Small Business Administration shoveled huge piles of its “CARES Act” “bailout” money to... fake businesses.
Christian Britschgi, of Reason reports:
That includes a crop of fictional agribusinesses with names like Ritter Wheat Club, Deely Nuts, and Beefy King, all supposedly located in less than arable New Jersey beach towns, and all of which received loans through the Small Business Administration's (SBA) Paycheck Protection Program (PPP).
Because nothing is more in line with bogus and unconstitutional agencies like the SBA and bogus, unconstitutional handouts like the CARES Act, than the tons of bogus and unconstitutional Federal Reserve Notes being handed to bogus and fraudulent businesses.
Something like a theme emerges, there…
The CARES Act, passed in March, approved $349 billion for the new program, which would be used to pay fees and reimburse banks that made low-interest loans to qualifying small businesses. Recipients of these loans could have their debts forgiven provided they spent the PPP loans on qualifying expenses like payroll, rent, and utilities. Subsequent bills passed by Congress allotted an additional $609 billion to the program.
Britschgi offers a big nod to folks at ProPublica, who dug into the fraud within the larger, less-questioned, fraud:
’There’s no farming here: We're a sandbar, for Christ's sake,’ Long Beach Township Mayor Joe Mancini, whose address was used on one of these fraudulent applications, told ProPublica, which published an investigation of PPP fraud yesterday (May 18).
The problem is so bad that the US Office of Inspector General investigated, coming up with mind-boggling results.
SBA quickly made billions of dollars of capital available to millions of businesses affected by the COVID-19 pandemic," notes an SBA Office of the Inspector General (OIG) report from January 2021. "However, although SBA made efforts to expedite capital to businesses as intended by the [CARES] Act, SBA lacks assurance that loans went to only eligible recipients.
What a surprise, Gomer…
Related: Luxury Restaurant & Hotel Chain Co-Owned by Robert De Niro Received 'at Least 14' PPP Loans
Notes Britschgi:
The OIG report found that some 55,000 loans, worth approximately $7 billion, were made to potentially ineligible businesses. That includes some 5,000 businesses that received some $403 million in loans despite having registered a Tax Identification Number after the February 15 cutoff for the program. That number likely undercounts the number of ineligible recipients, as the OIG report excludes sole proprietorships, the business organization method used by many of the fake farms ProPublica identified.
And, finally, Britschgi highlights this, via the federal OIG:
’Loans given to ineligible borrowers placed taxpayer funds at risk of financial loss and delayed the amount of available critical capital needed for eligible businesses to withstand the effects of the pandemic during the first round of PPP funding,’ the report continues.
But the Office of Inspector General could take the next step and observe that NO BUSINESS is “eligible” to get someone else’s forcibly expropriated money. That’s called “receiving stolen goods”, and it’s not only not constitutional, it’s not moral or ethical. It is offensive to imply that receiving stolen tax cash and money plundered from future taxpayers via government borrowing is okay as long as one is a member of a group that Congress deems “worthy.”
The politicians swear an oath to uphold the US Constitution. The CARES act and the PPP were not sanctioned by any constitutionally enumerated power granted to the federal government.
It is important to remind people of this, even as one observes the predictable absurdity of bailout money going to companies that never really existed.
These companies never existed, just like the power to hand them money doesn’t exist.