The federal government should offer significant assistance to small- and mid-sized service sector businesses so that they can retain their workers. Financial assistance to small business is financial support to workers, allowing workers to continue being paid by their employers during the coronavirus crisis. The goal should be to replace a large portion of the revenue (not just the payroll expenses) those businesses would have generated in the absence of being shut down due to the coronavirus. Low-margin businesses will face great financial difficulty losing multiple months of revenue, and many if not most small businesses would rather shut down or lay off a significant fraction of their workforce than take out a loan, even with a favorable or zero interest rate. The number of potential layoffs the U.S. economy is facing is deeply troubling, and an aggressive policy response is urgently needed. We estimate the cost of replacing 80 percent of the revenue for three months of private-sector firms with fewer than 500 employees, excluding the manufacturing, health, education, and finance industries, to be $1.2 trillion.
