How a pandemic tax break for small businesses – which has already cost taxpayers billions – has turned into a ‘modern gold rush’ thanks to consultancy firm plugged by Shark Tank star Kevin O’Leary

• Employee Retention Credit was created as an emergency response to lockdown
• Relief expired in late 2021 but businesses have until April 2025 to file a claim
• Firm Bottom Line Concepts – plugged by O’Leary – charges 15-25% fees to help business receive a payout

By Helena Kelly Consumer Reporter For Dailymail.Com

Updated: 08:19 EDT, 6 September 2023

You won’t find ‘Covid response’ ranking among the voters’ top concerns in any of the public opinion polls.

Justified fears over the economy, inflation, crime, and education are the issues grabbing all the headlines.

But think for a moment: The COVID pandemic lingers like a hangover over everything.

Did your business go under?

Have you struggled to buy baby formula?

Is your neighborhood less safe?

Did your child lose out on a year’s worth of learning?

Pandemic policies factored into all of these anxieties.

There are four states choosing governors today which best exemplify the harsh political battles over Covid policy.

And in a stunning rebuke of draconian, business-crushing, school-closing lockdowns, the leaders who were first to reopen are cruising to victory, while the panicked, power-hungry politicians, who drank most deeply from the cup of COVID madness are holding their collective breath this Election Day.

In the free states of Georgia and Florida Govs. Brian Kemp and Ron DeSantis, who both won squeakers four years ago, are up by as much as double digits.

In Michigan and New York, Govs. Gretchen Whitmer and Kathy Hochul, who were once thought to be untouchable, are now fighting for their political lives.

And let’s not forget Stacey Abrams, the perennial gubernatorial candidate who still thinks she won the 2018 Georgia race. Her Covid hysteria helped to destroy her 2022 chances.

Early on in the pandemic, New York state and Michigan infamously forced elderly Covid patients from hospitals back into nursing homes to deadly results. And that was just the beginning of the parade of policy horrors.

Hochul’s disgraced predecessor, Andrew Cuomo, was a hero to the left and the media – even nauseatingly winning an Emmy for staging self-serving daily COVID briefings.

That morbid obsession came to a screeching halt after he was exposed as a sexual harasser and a fraud, whose administration ghoulishly tried to hide the lethal impact of his nursing home policy.

And who can forget the cavalcade of capricious Covid restrictions, changing every day or so for over a year in places like New York City and Detroit.

Small businesses that would not and could not comply were just destroyed; some estimates say as many as one third of all of them in Gotham.

Cops raided Mac’s Public House in Staten Island because the pub refused to enforce mask mandates. They were fined and harassed. Now, they seem prescient.

Hochul could have blazed a new path.

But she didn’t.

She clung like a determined despot to the emergency powers granted to her under the state’s COVID disaster declaration, renewing them month after month, until finally realizing in September that New Yorkers had moved on.

Now the party that enabled this is getting their just deserts.

And who can forget the hypocrisy?

Remember the smiling faces of Hochul and Abrams in photos with masked school children, mocking not just the kids and their parents, but common sense itself.

The rules that were imposed on all the little people, didn’t apply to the rule-makers.

Whitmer discouraged out of state travel for Michiganders only to be found jet setting off to Florida for some much-needed R & R.

So, does Whitmer have any regrets about crushing her state with lockdowns?

A local TV news channel tried to ask her that just this week. And wouldn’t you know the governor suddenly had ‘audio problems,’ and couldn’t answer the question.

Last but assuredly not least, we are only now learning of the harm, yes harm, done to children in lockdown states who were denied the basic right to go to school.

Florida was the first state to reopen schools for 5 days a week of in-person learning. Texas was close behind.

They opened businesses, opened churches, opened bars and restaurants. They banned mask and vaccines mandates. And they were pilloried for it.

The Atlantic Magazine blared a bogus headline accusing Kemp of engaging in ‘human sacrifice’ in Georgia. DeSantis was cast by the media as something between a murderer and a war criminal.

It was a full court press of smears and false allegations from our dear legacy media, but it didn’t work.

Republican governors listened to their voters, not experts like Fauci and the clown car at the CDC. Now those voters are rewarding them.

Kemp, DeSantis, and Texas governor Gregg Abbott, are dominating their reelection campaigns.

But if you think that on the eve of the elections, Democrats learned their lesson – think again.

Abrams was on television on Sunday, accusing Kemp of ‘prematurely’ reopening his state.

How long would she have kept us in our basements? For eternity?

If you woke up on Election Day living in Florida or Georgia you live in a state that has experienced a strong economic rebound, to which people are actually moving, not fleeing.

Between the pandemic’s start in early 2020 and the summer of 2022, red states had added 341,000 jobs, blue states were still in a 1.3 million job deficit.

Need I say more?

If on the other hand you woke up in New York or Michigan the exact opposite is true.

If you’re still not convinced, consider this: One of the few safe Democrat incumbent governors, Jared Polis in Colorado was just about the only leader with a D after his name who showed restraint and didn’t just shut it all down.

‘The emergency is over,’ he declared in December 2021. Meanwhile, toddlers in New York City were still wearing masks.

Polis is on the 2024 presidential shortlist these days.

As people go to the polls, it is clear as the summer’s sun that anti-lockdown governors are being rewarded.

The elections in this quartet of states send an important message. Even if Hochul and Whitmer hold on in their races, they were supposed to be cakewalks, not public rebukes.

When all is said and done, the lockdowns may have lost.