I try to watch all the White House briefings, and I appreciate hearing about the thousands of ventilators and the millions of masks being delivered, and how nobody’s ever seen numbers like this before.

But those numbers don’t tell us what a lot of small businesses need to know and that is when those rescue checks are coming.

Business owners are seeing their own numbers, and those numbers are telling them that if the federal checks they were promised don’t show up soon, there won’t be any business left to cash those checks.

Congress and the President agreed on the rescue package 12 days ago. But it turns out that there isn’t a nationwide system that can rapidly hand out that much money to that many people.

This is looking like the financial version of the Obamacare rollout with the online portal crashing, except this time, the entire economy hangs in the balance.

Remember Andrew Yang? The Presidential candidate who proposed that universal basic income idea of $1000 a month for every adult?

That may have sounded crazy, but if we had that system today, our account numbers would already be on file, so that the Treasury Secretary could open the Emergency Rescue Disbursement program on his desktop, click “PAY EVERYBODY NOW” press ENTER, and your money would be there yesterday. In a perfect world.

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