The Chamber of Corporate Welfare
30th May 2015
Here’s a half-serious question: How much do taxpayers have to pay off Boeing to make the Export-Import Bank – finally and irrevocably go away? If the feds wrote a check to Boeing for $100 billion, would they then let the Exim Bank fade away after the current portfolio winds down?
I ask this because the airplane manufacturing company is, of course, the largest beneficiary of the Exim Bank. The bank provides subsidized loans and insurance contracts to foreign companies that buy American exports. Exim Bank doles out billions of dollars of loans and insurance subsidies every year and has become the poster child for corporate cronyism in Washington. Think of the bank as food stamps for America’s Fortune 500 companies. Ever since the early Reagan years, conservatives have been trying to eliminate the subsidies, but the bank has multiple lives.
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What is most insidious about the Exim bank, beyond the cronyism and risk of its $140 billion portfolio of taxpayer guaranteed loans, is that it turns business into advocates for big government. (This may explain, in part, why liberals like Nancy Pelosi who normally hate corporations, love the program so much.) This also explains why the largest business lobby in America, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, is spending more than $1 million on a lobbying campaign to save the program . There’s something that stinks to high heaven about a government racket in which businesses profit from government subsidies, and then turn around and employ lobbyist organizations to lobby for more tax dollars.