Today, the Texas Public Policy Foundation published a new paper that provides an economic analysis of the RESTART Act, a bipartisan bill working its way through Congress.

“The goal of the RESTART Act is for businesses to use the 6 months of additional funding to restart or accelerate their operations,” says the paper’s author Charles F. Beauchamp, Ph.D., CTP. “If implemented, the RESTART Act represents an assistance package that is timely and targeted at those businesses most in need and at creating jobs, and temporary in that it has a 6-month cost cap on its loan program. The act is rooted in private property rights in that the goal is to provide compensation for the cash inflow that the government indirectly took from businesses during the economic lockdowns.”

The RESTART Act seeks to provide increased flexibility to the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) recipients. In addition, its most important and forward looking provision is a longer-term loan funding program than the original PPP designed to cover up to 6 months of payroll, benefits, and fixed operating expenses for the businesses hardest hit by the economic fallout due to COVID-19 and associated lockdowns by state and local governments.

“In our analysis of the RESTART Act, we found that while it is a step in the right direction to helping Americans recover from the effects of COVID-19 and government lockdowns, the addition of a rehire provision to the legislation would go a long way towards helping to keep business operating and workers working while bringing unemployed people back to the dignity of work,” said TPPF’s Chief Economist Vance Ginn, Ph.D. “The cost of this Act could be funded by reallocating unspent CARES Act dollars which prevents adding more to the national debt.”


Click the link to read Economic Analysis of U.S. Senate Bill 3814: Reviving the Economy Sustainably Towards A Recovery in Twenty-twenty Act (RESTART Act) in full.