Mark Cuban warns Texas is 'not yet' ready to fully reopen for business

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Mark Cuban: Stringent guidelines are necessary to restore public's confidence as we re-open America

'Shark Tank' star Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks, joins Laura Ingraham on 'The Ingraham Angle.'

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Entrepreneur and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban told "The Ingraham Angle" Tuesday that his adopted home state is "not yet" ready to return to business as usual despite optimistic pronouncements from Gov. Greg Abbott.

"The reality is that the state and federal government need to put together protocols that define what's necessary to protect not only the customers coming in, but the employees as well," Cuban told host Laura Ingraham, adding that "I can give you a thousand examples of things that haven't been thought out yet that we need to talk about."

THE CORONAVIRUS OUTBREAK, STATE-BY-STATE

Abbott said earlier Tuesday that he planned to release an executive order April 27 outlining next steps to reopen the state's economy, noting that the order is contingent on a plan to increase testing as well as contact tracing. Beginning Friday, stores in Texas can offer so-called "retail to go" services.

"The good news is Texas is prepared to take very positive steps in opening up our state and finally ensuring that we’re going to have more of our employees going back to work [and] more of our employers opening the doors for their employees as well as for customers,” Abbott said.

"Let's say you want to go in and buy clothing at a store and you try something on, but you don't want to buy it. What happens next?" Cuban posited before giving another hypothetical: "You walk into a restaurant and you see somebody sneeze that has a mask on. They leave the mask there. How are they supposed to dispose of it? It seems [like] common sense, you just throw it in the trash, but should you treat that as a hazardous material?

"What are the protocols in restrooms, you know? What can be touched? What can't be touched?" Cuban added. "These are the things that if the state were to publish the guidelines that were specific to each different type of business, then that would increase consumer confidence to walk into these businesses. The fact that there's no federal and state guidelines means it's all up in the air and you just have to trust these companies."

Cuban also addressed reports that potentially thousands of small business owners had missed out on loans from the Small Business Association's Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) before the fund ran out of money last week. He told Ingraham that the law creating the program "should have ... delineated right off the top that public companies are not eligible."

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"The banks are just trying to do their best [but] they were overmatched," he said. "... The reality is there should have been limits placed in terms of total assets, total revenues, other ways to determine if a company or organization is too big to qualify, and that was a failing.

"But look, they rushed it through and they needed to get the money out quickly, so we expected that there would be mistakes," Cuban went on, "but there should have been asset limits placed on this."