WASHINGTON, D.C. – In case you missed it, Senator Rick Scott wrote an op-ed for Fox News on how taxpayer dollars from the CARES Act should be supporting individuals and small businesses severely impacted by the Coronavirus, not big businesses or wealthy institutions.

In the op-ed, Senator Rick Scott wrote, “While much of the funding in the CARES Act was necessary and will help those struggling during this crisis, unfortunately, many programs are riddled with waste, inefficiency and potential fraud. These federal programs are “erring” a lot, and many of the beneficiaries aren’t hard-working families. It’s big businesses, well-connected industries, wealthy property owners and, in some cases, dead people.

More than 70 publicly traded companies have received taxpayer-funded loans (that can be forgiven) through the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), which was meant to support small businesses that are suffering. Nothing in the bill required businesses to prove that they are suffering financial harm from this crisis.

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You know what small businesses didn’t get a loan under the PPP? Your local coffee shop, florist, hairdresser or mom-and-pop hardware store. After the well-connected businesses with long-standing financial relationships with the banks got their forgivable loans, the program ran out of money.

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The political class in Washington scoffs when people like me say that government needs to be run like a business. They say government’s too complicated to run like a business. Any elected official or government bureaucrat who believes that should resign tomorrow, because they are part of the problem.

Common sense isn’t complicated.

Don’t send money to dead people. That’s not complicated.

Don’t bail out huge corporations or send taxpayer money to businesses that haven’t been hurt by this crisis. That’s not complicated.

Don’t incentivize workers to stay on government-run, taxpayer-funded programs when this crisis has ended and we need them to go back to work. That’s not complicated.

Democrats, and unfortunately many Republicans, push the lie that government just has to be wasteful, that there’s nothing we can do about it. We just have to accept it. They push that lie so when the time comes for them to propose their trillion-dollar big-government programs or their giveaways to connected special interests, no one will pay attention.

Don’t believe the lie.”

Read the full op-ed in Fox News HERE.

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