President Joe Biden and top Republican Kevin McCarthy are due to meet at the White House on Monday for talks on lifting the US debt ceiling.
The pair spoke on the phone on Sunday as the president was traveling back from the G7 summit in Japan.
The two sides remain at odds over budget cuts demanded by the Republicans as a condition for raising the ceiling.
The debt ceiling is a spending limit set by Congress that determines how much money the government can borrow.
Before this past year, in which the coronavirus took more than 374,000 lives and permanently shuttered around four million small businesses, few people appreciated the crucial role of the U.S. Small Business Administration as well as Karen Mills.
Today, the former SBA administrator has plenty of company. More than 7.1 million businesses received some form of aid from the agency in 2020. Over 5.2 million small businesses received a Paycheck Protection Program loan during the first and second tranches of the aid program, 1.8 million businesses received debt relief from the agency, and more than 42,300 businesses received a loan through the SBA’s flagship 7(a) loan program in 2020.
Former Vice President Joe Biden said Amazon (AMZN) should “start paying their taxes” in a broader critique of large, successful businesses.
“I don’t think any company, I don’t give a damn how big they are, the Lord Almighty, should absolutely be in a position where they pay no tax and make billions and billions and billions of dollars,” the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee said in an interview with CNBC on Friday.
For the 2017 and 2018 tax years, Amazon’s own financial filings showed that it expected to receive money back from the federal government, not that it owed money in income tax. For the 2019 tax year, Amazon said it owed more than $1 billion in federal income tax, a figure experts said amounted to little more than 1% of its profits.
Dispatches From The Front 