Hacker News Reader

Comment by danans | Hacker News Reader

It would appear the South had a very high rate of small businesses receiving the loans versus other areas. This is fascinating given that the South was the last area to lock down and the first to open up. Can anyone posit a reason for the clearly higher rates? Are there higher rates of self-employment there?

View on HN

Republican leadership

(honestly not being sarcastic...that seems to be an active and intentional goal of this administration)

While it's a good angle for some investigative journalism, I'm not ready to reach that conclusion unless some evidence emerges that shows that the loan approval process was politically slanted.

What's even more striking in the statistics is that the loan granting rate in the south is significantly lower in many cases than the percentage of small business jobs saved. this seems to especially be the case in the poorest states in the South.

There is a long pattern of behavior, which to me is evidence. Reported in places such as:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/this-is-hardball-tru...

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/05/trump-e...

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/05/coronavirus-trump-says-blue-...

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/09/trump-e...

I believe there was even a Harvard public policy journal article that made this argument which I can't locate at the moment.

In general, I agree that the administration's policies have targeted blue states for punishment, the biggest example being the tax cut. But in the specific instance of the PPP loans, I'm just going to wait for the investigative reporting.

That said the POTUS quotes in the CNBC article you linked regarding funding for coronavirus relief are pretty interesting in retrospect:

“because all the states that need help — they’re run by Democrats in every case.”

“Florida is doing phenomenal, Texas is doing phenomenal, the Midwest is, you know, fantastic — very little debt,”

Correction to my comment above: The loan rate in the South is significantly higher than the percentage of small business jobs saved, not lower.

My gut says one potential reason would be that small businesses in the South tend to have a much shorter pipeline of upcoming work, along with fewer labor protections.

E.g. a tradesperson will generally be out day-of in a metro, vs that very much not being my experience in the NE.

Does the data say that? Or is this just a visual effect (certain colors are more prominent, subdivisions are larger in the south and west)

Just tap/hover over each state for the state level stats.

Ah thank you. Not noticing a major imbalance.

Compare Mississippi's stats to Michigan's.

It would help to know rate of pay in those areas. If these areas pay less then the loans were more appealing. Keep in mind the map doesn't tell us who / how many applied, only who got. As the article mentions some chose not to apply.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com