Posted on 09/21/2014 7:27:58 AM PDT by Kaslin
Last week, the U.S. House of Representatives voted to extend the legal ability for the Export-Import Bank to run for another nine months. The peoples legislature passed the stop-gap measure, 319-108, with both bipartisan support and bipartisan opposition.
Just last month, President Obama expressed dismay that Republicans could possibly be against it.
For some reason, he intoned, right now the House Republicans have decided that we shouldnt do this . He pretended incredulity and puzzlement. He gave the usual reasoning for the subsidized financial guarantees, and insisted that every country does this.
When, he inquired, did that become something that Republicans opposed?
Obama couldve asked all those members of his own party who likewise opposed it. He didnt.
But then, he could have simply asked himself.
Back in 2008, he very clearly put the Ex-Im Bank on the theoretical chopping block. Candidate Obama gave up the big business bank as a program that didnt work and one that had become little more than a fund for corporate welfare.
So why the change of mind, Mr. Obama?
Has the Ex-Im ceased being a fund for corporate welfare?
No. Its still there, propping up big businesses doing business abroad indeed, multinationals abroad, the kind of companies that Obamas Occupier friends despise so deeply.
Chris Chocola calls the bank a government-sponsored slush fund. Chocola is a former Indiana congressman and the current president of the Club for Growth, which is arguably the Ex-Im banks biggest opponent. The Club maintains that the Export-Import Bank is crony capitalism at its worst.
Ex-Im has long been known as the Bank of Boeing. More than 60 percent of its loan subsidies go to the aerospace companys customers to buy from, and thus benefit, Boeing.
Still, the airline company isnt the only behemoth to receive the banks bennies. Perusing The Club for Growths Top 10 Clients of the Export Import Bank, one finds such financial diamonds-in-the-rough as Solyndra, Enron, an oil company with ties to the Russian Mafia, the China National Nuclear Power Corporation, First Solar (to export solar panels to itself), Mexican drug cartels well, you probably get the idea.
And choosing such clients doesnt come without hits to government integrity. That is, the bank doesnt work without some corruption. The U.S. Export-Import Bank has suspended or removed four officials in recent months amid investigations into allegations of gifts and kickbacks, as well as attempts to steer federal contracts to favored companies reports the Wall Street Journal.
Diane Katz, a research fellow in regulatory policy at The Heritage Foundation, testified before Congress that government authorities have documented a variety of problems with bank operations, including mismanagement, dysfunction, fraud, and corruption. Such problems invariably arise when government assumes a function far beyond its proper purview.
And yet weve been told over and over that this is a good deal for the taxpayers. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce tweeted recently that The Ex-Im Bank doesnt cost the American taxpayer a dime.
Isnt this easy money? After all, its just loans and loan guarantees we are talking about here.
Who has ever heard of banks making bad investments?
Lesson No. 1 of our time: look up moral hazard
Of course, if you want to keep funneling money to big business, it helps to keep bad books. The Congressional Budget Office reported May 22 that if Ex-Im used proper accounting methods, writes the Washington Examiners Timothy Carney, it would be budgeted as a $2 billion cost to the taxpayers per decade.
That isnt free.
Last but not least, theres the principle that government shouldnt be in the business of picking winners and losers in our economic lives any more than it should be favoring one religion or philosophy over others in our personal lives. Let private banks loan money at their own risk. Not the taxpayers.
Market forces should dictate trade flows, not bureaucrats and politicians, argues Chocola. The sooner we can shut down this corporate welfare dispensary, the better.
Get the cronyism out of capitalism.
There is no shortage of reasons to demand that our representatives in Washington do the right thing and take a sledge hammer to this piggy bank. Unfortunately, last weeks vote cant even be used by the Club for Growth to determine the positions of members of Congress. As happens so often, the House leadership hid the Ex-Im provision inside a continuing resolution that contained other consequential matters, notably funding moderate rebels in Syria.
So politicians have maintained their beloved wiggle-room.
I would like to see CRs abolished except in time of a DECLARED WAR. Let the #%# Gov shut down since the two parties have no stomach for it. No appropriations - GO HOME AND LEAVE US ALONE. I feel sorry for the millions of Americans that have nothing to live on other than handouts from uncle sam, but there has to be a lesson learned before we are at the bottom of the canyon - we are already way over the cliff financially. A pox on the GOP-e
A form of wealth transfer from the masses to the ‘insiders’ at the top of the political food chain, nothing more.
Now that the libturds have ratcheted spending to record levels all they have to do is sit and let the Brown Shirt Media cover against any decrease in spending.
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