Print This Post

Government to Aid Small Businesses

I typically do not blog about politics or government. But like a growing number of people, I am outraged by the huge bonuses AIG will give its derivative traders — basically our tax dollars after getting significant chunks of the bailout monies. They should have just given all the AIG bailout money to small businesses!

I suppose to counter all the flak the Administration is getting for approving the AIG bailout, President Obama announced today that his government will help out small businesses mainly by easing the credit squeeze:

• By buying up to $15 billion of securities that are linked to small-business loans.
• By increasing loan guarantees for small business to 90 percent of the loan value to encourage banks and other lenders to extend credit,
• By waiving the Small Business Administration’s loan fees
• By requiring banks that received federal bailout money to report each month how much small-business lending they did.
• The IRS also announced that small businesses with deductions exceeding their income in 2008 could use a new net operating loss tax provision to get a refund of taxes paid in prior years

Being an eternal optimist, I hope that these measures — and more — will help usher in economic recovery for all of us. But I still think that the government should have given more money earlier to small businesses, instead of giving tax payers money to big companies who then sponsor expensive golf tournament sponsorships or pay millions of dollars in bonuses.