This morning we received an email from Congressman Mike Kelly’s office asking us as residents of his 16th Congressional District to tell him what should be in the next stimulus bill if there was to be another.

First of all would be the question: Is this our new way of existing, and if so, how close to socialism dare we get?

We don’t want to be hypocritical. We benefitted from a Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loan to the Eagle. Nearly 90 percent of the funds went into payroll and health benefits. There were limitations on how much money anyone could earn and receive from those funds, so none of the higher compensated individuals or family members could receive any of it.

The rules and directions for qualifying and using the funds were pretty clear. We didn’t agree with all of them, especially the part of having to rush to spend it all in just eight weeks. That was later relaxed and businesses were granted 24 weeks which made more sense, but half the companies had already spent the funding under the initial rules.

But the question is: What is next? We could be very self-serving and say save local news sources. Is that needed?

It is if you want local news from newspapers, radio and television in the future because the revenue to all of those is drying up as retail — including bars and restaurants — are forced to cut back on advertising because they can only seat 25 percent of the people they had prior to March.

But what else is there that is also in dire need? You have schools and hospitals, for certain. They have to be at the top of the list.

Unemployment benefits? How long can the same people ride the same train?

At some point we have to have room for the new people about to join the list of unemployed.

The extra $600 per week didn’t have enough structure to it and therefore didn’t seem to help the economy as intended. It would have been drastically difficult to track, but maybe those funds should have been usable only for food and shelter, instead of telling people not to honor the commitments to pay rent or mortgages.

What many hoped would help the public and the business community at the same time turned into a miserable failure and now the public just wants to know when more free money is coming and how much.

None of them are asking who will pay for it. The first round has already obligated the next three or four generations of taxpayers.

The other issue concerning PPP, which is prevalent in the news today, is should all loans under $250,000 be forgiven without any details as to how the money was spent having to be submitted. To that, we emphatically say NO!

You can’t just give anyone a quarter-million dollars of taxpayers’ money and say spend it however you wish. There was probably some wrong spending under the plan, but if you do this, we can expect the next windfall of cash to be spent far more frivolously.

The problem is the government had no plan for how to check if these loans were spent correctly, and now that would fall on the banks to do.

Keep in mind these are the same banks that already showed partiality in how they gave out the loans to their own customers first. So, we believe the forgiveness requirements as originally devised should be followed and make someone in this world still be accountable.