The coronavirus epidemic is a crisis for our country on multiple fronts: medical, political, economic, and beyond. At The Atlantic, Annie Lowrey zeroes in on the devastating losses among small businesses across America as both an immediate and long-term problem for the country. She notes that prior to the pandemic, only half of small businesses had sufficient cash reserves to last more than two weeks in the event of a closure like so many are now undergoing. Although relief programs designed to benefit small businesses made it through Congress, those were insufficiently funded and funneled money disproportionately to larger businesses. Lowrey notes that “researchers found no evidence that money went to the places and industries hit hardest, as measured by business closures and declines in hours worked.”
But as bad as the current situation is for small businesses, Lowrey looks to the future — and the outlook is grim, both for these companies and for the health of the U.S. economy going forward. The dispensing of funds is leaving minority-owned firms out in the cold — one study found that an estimated 95% of African America-owned businesses, 91% of Latino-owned businesses, and 75% of Asian-owned businesses had almost no possibility of receiving emergency loans from a “mainstream financial institution.” The consequence would be a perpetuation and growth of inequalities that already punish minority groups in America and hobble our collective economy. Beyond this, a future in which millions of small businesses are forced to close is a future with slower job growth and thus collective wealth for average Americans. Lowrey notes that small businesses are responsible for net job growth in the U.S., and that the alternative — a country where industries consolidate — will both keep wages lower and increase prices for goods and services.
It's a depressing picture, but it’s hard to see how it won’t more or less come to pass without public awareness and decisive action to turn this trajectory around. I have to hold onto the hope that millions of Americans will find this projected culling of the most vital sector of the American economy both unacceptable and in urgent need of remedy. The small business emergency cross-cuts with the disproportionate impact the pandemic is already having on the finances and health of minority and lower-income Americans; without adequate government intervention, the likely consequence is that both established businesses and the better-off are more likely to be spared, and will even prosper in the aftermath of the pandemic, while those less fortunate are harder hit, with a diminished future to look forward to. It seems likely that the Republican Party will try to pin these injustices on the pandemic, if it chooses to acknowledge them at all, but political choices created these inequalities to begin with, and only political choices can get us out. In this way, as in so many others, the coronavirus points inescapably to the conclusion that only massive, ground-up reform will keep our country from an unending future path of immiseration for the majority.