
Ask HN: Couple of ideas for saving small businesses. What do you think? - shreyshrey
I have a problem with indiscriminately bailing out large multinationals when honest, tax paying small business suffer during a crisis period. Any bailout plan should be equitable to all businesses: large or small and should not reward bad behaviour.<p>It is often said there is not a practical way for govt to distribute money to SMBs. So they take the easy route of giving money to large companies.<p>1. What about SBA guarantees  small business  loans up to 3X of last federal tax paid by the company for 0% interest. The small business can repay the loan in 5 years.<p>2. If you want a more radical plan, give 6 months of payroll as a loan to every small business for 0%-0.25% interest. Payback period is 5 years.<p>These ideas are easy to implement, rewards good behavior and equitable.<p>What do you think?
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mdorazio
How does giving businesses loans help exactly? You've just added debt to their
financials without any corresponding increase in revenue to offset it, either
now or in the future, and decreased their ability to take out more effective
loans later. A small business simply cannot guarantee revenue streams to pay
back giant loans after the current crisis is over, nor do they have the
financial strength to weather an entire quarter or more of virtually no
revenue.

If you want to save small businesses, you need to hit pause on all their
bottom line costs until demand picks back up. That means freezing
mortgage/rent payments, property taxes, and other debt obligations they have
today. Anything short of that is mostly wishful thinking or throwing tax
dollars at a non-viable solution. Also note that this doesn't help small
business employees - I don't care how kind-hearted a business owner is, you
can't pay employees when you're not making any money. Taking on giant loans to
pay them is ridiculous - you're better off having the government pay them
instead.

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markshepard
Loans help small businesses the same way it helps the large businesses to buy
time / ride the crisis. You have a lengthy pay back period and the interest
rate is zero - offers liquidity. Many small businesses have only 30- 60 days
opex as cash.

Freezing the debt obligation helps too - but it is harder to implement that
since there are many parties involved in that transaction.

~~~
mdorazio
Loans _don 't_ help small businesses the same way they do large ones because
small businesses don't have the margins and market size to be able to pay them
back in the future when things pick back up. They would get through this
crisis and have the exact same financials they did before, except worse
because now they've got a fat load of debt hanging on their balance sheets
forever.

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matt_the_bass
I run an SMB. These things would be valuable for my business right now:

1\. Grant for R&D projects. There is a lot we could do while WFH that would
make our products better after this. It would be great to not need to worry
about customers atm and just work on innovation.

2\. Low/no interest loans for 3-6 months of expenses. We have a lot of
outstanding receivables. All our customers are holding payment. We’ll get it
later, but we need that cash now. We also have a lot of customer opportunities
in the pipeline. Most of them won’t go away. But they will be 6-12 months
delayed. But we’ll need the cash 3 months from now not 9-15 mo this from now.

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throw_this_one
The government should just simply freeze all loans that affect these sectors.

Who would then get affected? Mostly rich rentier types and then the banks. The
banks will be given super low interest rates from the fed to cover the
shortfalls in interest from these loans.

Essential services like food/medicine production, etc should be given grants
to fill in any production holes.

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chewz
Forgive all personal debts. That would stimulate demand side.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22658643](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22658643)

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Gustomaximus
I suspect we are better off encouraging demand side with generous unemployment
payments. Something that takes into account your income like UK. This can
buffer the impact.

If I'm right in believing this will be an ongoing issue for at least 6 months
and likely over a year then nothing is going to realistically save many
businesses that have little revenue over these time frames. That said other
business will do well like medical and home delivery groceries.

We need to protect people. It truely sux if someone loses their business
through no fault of their own but what's important is make sure these people
have some money ongoing after the fact. Then the economy will repair itself to
the new reality, and again when a vaccine or other solution is found down the
track.

Also I think making sure landlords and banks can't kick people outta homes and
similar with utilities are important.

Further well likely need some dry power when this is over to kick-start the
global economy.

...hard questions and who really knows.

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nehagup
Is this for Mozilla "Save the internet" challenge? :D

