Biden ‘Main Street’ Plan will Help Arizona Small Businesses Forced to Close Due to COVID-19

Local Business Owner: “I Trust Joe Biden” to Help Small Businesses

Joe Biden has a message for Arizona small business owners: Help is on the way. His economic recovery plan calls for providing further immediate relief to working families and small businesses, and also revamps the federal Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) to expand it and make it more fair.

Local business owners Dina Firnstahl and Maggie Kerley have temporarily closed down their Phoenix salon. Dina tells Salon Kismet’s story and expresses frustrations with President Donald Trump’s handling of the Paycheck Protection Program in a new digital ad from Biden for President.

“It’s so frustrating that big corporations got millions in PPP before small businesses like ours. The president we have is not caring about the little people, but that’s how Donald Trump is. He’s all about himself,” Dina says.

Many Arizona small businesses like Salon Kismet were left behind in the first round of loans from the federal program. Back in April, KJZZ News reported that the initial PPP loans “were plagued with technical issues and criticism that larger businesses like restaurant chains and construction companies were prioritized over small, local businesses.”

Dina presents the solution in her video. “We need Joe Biden. We gotta help small businesses like ours to get through this crisis, and I trust Joe Biden to do that for us,” she says.

Economic analysis from Opportunity Insights shows that as of September 24, the number of small businesses operating in Arizona had decreased by 21.7 percent since January 2020. The sectors hit hardest by the coronavirus pandemic were leisure and hospitality (down more than 36 percent), education and health services, and retail and transportation.

In his economic agenda, Biden calls for providing further immediate relief to working families, small businesses, and communities.

The Biden-Harris Plan to Rescue and Revitalize Main Street will overhaul PPP to guarantee every qualifying business with 50 employees or less gets relief, so the bigger and more sophisticated aren’t able to win in a first-come, first-served race. It also ensures small businesses — especially minority-owned businesses — obtain relief quickly and easily; issues flexible grants — not loans — for true small businesses that have lost substantial revenue; and addresses the rampant fraud and unjust enrichment that’s taken place under Trump’s watch.

Even before the pandemic, President Trump asked Congress to slash more than $200 million from programs that support Main Street businesses. Instead of helping people of color start and expand businesses, Trump tried to eliminate the Minority Business Development Agency, which is the only federal agency focused on the development and growth of minority-owned businesses.