Congress should look at a targeted approach on small businesses to better help owners and employees who have been harmed by the coronavirus pandemic because not all businesses are labor-intensive, Sen. Tim Scott said Tuesday.
"(With) the overhead expenses for a small business as a gym, with hundreds of thousands of square feet, your revenue goes towards the rent," the South Carolina Republican said on Fox News' "Fox and Friends." "It goes towards the mortgage more so than it does to the employees."
The $2 trillion economic relief bill passed in March includes a $350 billion Paycheck Protection Program that allows up to eight weeks of cash that small businesses can use to pay employees and overhead so they can keep their businesses afloat during the coronavirus closures.
But such aid doesn't help all businesses, said Scott, because "if you have no business, you have no paycheck."
"If we have a chance to go back, we should start targeting businesses and sectors so that the relief actually ends up keeping businesses open and paychecks flowing," he said.
The senator also discussed his new book, "Opportunity Knocks: How Hard Work, Community and Business can Improve Lives and End Poverty," which was released on Tuesday.
"My life talks a lot about my failure in high school, failing at business, failing at politics," said Scott. "Failure for me isn't fatal if you don't quit. Most of my opportunities are on the other side of my obstacles."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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