As they say in the business world, getting rich is easier using other people’s money. There’s even a catchy acronym – OPM. 

During the Obama administration, when the U.S. government provided $787 billion in economic stimulus, a lot of that OPM initially came in the form of taxpayer dollars designed to spur economic growth and consumer spending.

Whether the stimulus bill helped jump-start the economy after the 2008 recession is a matter of lingering partisan debate. But it’s safe to say that most fiscal conservatives viewed the stimulus package as a deficit-ballooning boondoggle and still do.

That’s why it’s so odd that Obama-era stimulus money has become a flashpoint in one of the most hotly contested GOP Senate primaries this cycle as both sides jockey for the title of the true conservative in the race – and try to use a big-government bludgeon on the other.

While some of the multimillion-dollar government-backed loans were abject failures (see: Solyndra), the Obama administration credited others with helping spur small-business job creation.

Some of the loans also had the side effect of making owners of the recipient companies wealthy -- or wealthier -- in the process, providing plenty of new fodder for corporate welfare critics.

Garland Tucker III, the retired Raleigh businessman challenging North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis (pictured) in the 2020 Republican primary, reaped one such windfall. Now 72, Tucker founded and ran a business development company that received hundreds of millions of dollars in low-interest loans from the U.S. Small Business Administration, as RealClearPolitics reported in late June.

SBA loans have long drawn conservative ire. President Reagan – one of Tucker’s personal heroes – even pushed to abolish the agency, casting the loans as welfare for the wealthy. But the Obama stimulus, the largest spending bill in American history, provided a double whammy for anti-spending advocates. Along with the more than $275 billion in federal contracts, grants and loans the stimulus doled out, it dramatically increased loan limits in the SBA’s Small Business Investment Company program.

Triangle Capital Corp. (TCAP), Tucker’s highly profitable business development company, greatly benefited from the increased limits available – “a gift from the stimulus bill,” as one financial analyst has called it. The amount of SBA loans on Triangle’s books exploded – more than doubling during the Obama administration, jumping 66% from 2009 to 2011 alone as the stimulus was implemented.

Tucker’s pay at Triangle Capital also soared during the Obama years, spiking from $1 million in 2009 to $3.7 million in 2016 before he stepped down from running the company in mid-2017.

Along with helping to create “hundreds of thousands of jobs,” part of the Tucker campaign’s defense of his decision to tap into the loan program was that it would have put him at a competitive disadvantage in the industry had he not taken them.

“Practically speaking, businesses like [TCAP] have little choice but to comply with the government’s rules to be competitive,” campaign spokesman Francis De Luca told RealClearPolitics in June. “TCAP received SBIC loans to, in turn, invest in small and medium-sized American businesses to create jobs.”

It’s an argument that garners sympathy even from stalwart fiscal conservatives.

“In the era of big government, companies are forced to take grants and to deal with Washington, D.C., and it’s a CEO’s primary responsibility to meet the fiduciary needs of their shareholders,” Richard Manning, president of Americans for Limited Government, told RCP.

“Given this, it’s not surprising when a corporation engages in what appears to be corporate cronyism. When government controls whether you’re profitable or not, it is a problem, but you can’t blame the CEO for doing what’s in his company’s interest,” Manning added.

Business-friendly Republicans can see both sides of the issue, but Tillis’ supporters argue that the stimulus funding issue is fair game, considering that Tucker has derided the federal debt as “immoral” during his Senate campaign and for months has been running television ads attacking Tillis for his record on government spending.

And Tucker is dipping into his personal fortune, which the SBA loans undeniably helped boost, to fund his election effort. As of late September, Tucker had loaned his campaign $1.25 million and is running ads on Fox News Channel hitting Tillis’ lack of “backbone” to cut spending when he initially opposed President Trump’s plan to cut foreign aid by 30%.

Team Tillis has countered by creating a “Truth About Tucker” website blasting him for, among other things, benefiting from “Obama’s Big Government” and making his fortune “on the backs of taxpayers under the Obama presidency by exploiting big government handout programs.”

The Tucker campaign is now trying to counter that criticism by pointing out that TCAP paid back every SBA loan it received, with interest: “Those SBA loans didn’t cost taxpayers a penny. And they created jobs,” De Luca said in a written statement to RCP.

He also said Tillis voted “for the same SBA program he is now calling ‘big government handouts,’” and cited the first-term senator’s votes for $268 million in SBA funding in 2015 and 2019.

“That’s flip-flop, Thom,” De Luca added.

The flip-flop argument is weakened when considering that the SBA funding was tucked into massive spending measures Trump signed into law to keep the government running and wasn’t a controversial part of those bills,  which passed the Senate with wide, bipartisan margins.

And contrary to the argument that TCAP was simply following market trends by increasing the amount of SBA loans on its books, the company was involved in lobbying to raise the loan caps during the Obama administration and its executives were closely tracking developments in Washington on the topic.

TCAP was a dues-paying member of a trade association, the National Association of Small Business Investment Companies, that lobbied for the stimulus. As part of the stimulus package, Congress significantly increased the maximum available amount of Small Business Investment Company funds to $225 million, up from $137.5 million.

NASBIC spent nearly $200,000 lobbying Congress and the SBA on the stimulus package in 2009 and 2010, lobbying records show.

According to TCAP’s February 2009 earning release, it had a maximum borrowing limit at the time of $150 million, then applied for a second SBIC license a few months later, giving it an additional $75 million in borrowing power.

By Tucker’s final year with the company, 2016, TCAP had $250 million in SBA-guaranteed loans on its books, according to Securities and Exchange Commission records.

Call transcripts also show that TCAP executives were closely monitoring the congressional approval of further SBIC loan limit increases.

In a March 2012 call, TCAP CFO Steven Lilly referred to “what we have been hearing from our friends at NASBIC” in discussing efforts to further lift the caps on SBIC loans, which Lilly said they “would feel thankful” for because they were positioned to “capitalize” on the additional “SBA leverage.” 

Some members of Congress in recent years have pressed to expand the program as a way to further stimulate the economy and create jobs. In 2016, Congress increased the amount of outstanding leverage allowed for a company holding two or more SBIC licenses to $350 million from $225 million. 

Howver, SBIC loan critics have continued to warn that expanding the loan program too far could produce losses if businesses default on the loans, adding to the spiraling deficit. The better way to help small businesses and create jobs, they argue, is for Congress to reduce business taxes and exercise greater federal fiscal restraint.