Paycheck Protection Program Sends SD at Least $1.3B, Saves over 180K Jobs

In his latest rock’em-sock’em journalism, SDPB’s Seth Tupper grabs the Small Business Administration’s latest deliberately vague data on the Paycheck Protection Program and maps the data for South Dakota businesses that have received this coronavirus relief subsidy. SBA only tells us ranges, not exact dollar figures, for loans of $150K or more, and it hides the names of all businesses whose PPP handouts are less than $150K. Nonetheless, from Tupper’s reporting, we learn that…

1. 20,563 South Dakota organizations received PPP loans of less than $150K.
2. Those small loans add up to over $556 million, or $27.5K per recipient.
3. SBA says those small loans protected 80,005 jobs, meaning those loans averaged $7,080 per worker. (Remember, PPP requires at least 60% of loans be used for wages, so the average that went directly into workers’ pockets could be more like five or six thousand dollars.)
4. 1,944 South Dakota organizations received PPP loans of $150K or greater.
5. SBA reports those large loans in ranges: $150K to $350K, $350K to $1M, $1M to $2M, $2M to $5M, and $5M to $10M.
6. Absent specific dollar figures, we can’t calculate an actual total or average for those large loans.
   1. However, given those ranges, we can conclude that the 1,944 biggest PPP borrowers received at least $722 million.
   2. If the average loan amount in each range was exactly in the middle of each range ($250K, $675K, $1.5M, $3.5M, $7.5M), the total disbursements to the $150K+ borrowers would top $1.2 billion.
7. SBA says those large loans protected 101,628 jobs.
   1. If we assume the lower bound for each loan range, the large PPP loans averaged $7,104 per job protected.
   2. If we assume the fantasy middle average for each range, the large PPP loans averaged $12,196 per job protected.
8. Large PPP loans plus small PPP loans protected a total of 181,633 South Dakota jobs.
   1. In May 2020, 421,779 South Dakotans had jobs.
   2. PPP socialist checks are thus sustaining 43% of South Dakota workers through this failure of the free market.
9. Nine freedom-loving capitalist enterprises received PPP government checks for $5 million or more:
   1. Coca-Cola Bottling Company High Country, Rapid City
   2. Dakota Provisions (the turkey plant!), Huron
   3. Empirical Foods, Inc. (formerly BPI, makers of yummy pink slime!), of Dakota Dunes
   4. Harms Oil Company of Brookings
   5. Muth Electric, Inc., of Mitchell
   6. Pete Lien & Sons, Inc., of Rapid City
   7. Regency Midwest Ventures, LP, of Sioux Falls
   8. Showplace Wood Products of Harrisburg
   9. Sonofi Solutions, Inc., of Sioux Falls
10. Over 50% (50.97%, to be more exact) of the jobs protected by PPP loans in South Dakota are located in four cities: Sioux Falls (52,508), Rapid City (24,529), Aberdeen (9,648), and Watertown (5,894).
    1. 67.89% of the jobs saved by this outburst of socialism were in thirteen towns with over 2,000 protected workers: the four above, plus Brookings, Mitchell, North Sioux City, Yankton, Spearfish, Huron, Pierre, Brandon, and Madison.

Nationwide, the Small Business Administration reports that, as of 5 p.m. Eastern July 6, it had approved 4,880,943 Paycheck Protection Program loans worth $521,150,924,128, an average of $106,772 per loan through 5,460 lenders.