Meet the Export-Import Bank Republican ignorami, purveyors of crock

Economics ignorami that they are, a majority of House Republicans joined all but one Democrat on Wednesday to reauthorize the Export-Import Bank, that bastion of corruption and corporate wealthfare. The vote was 313-118.

Among those in dire need of remedial history and finance tutorials are Pennsylvania's Mike Kelly, Tim Murphy and Bill Shuster. Of the local congressional delegation, only Keith Rothfus had the guts to stand up to this market-perverting molestation of the public purse by America's largest corporations.

The innocent sounding pitch for the Export-Import Bank is that it “facilitates” trade, boosting more American-made products. But the reality, as the Heritage Foundation and others long have argued, is that it uses tax dollars to provide loans to help big businesses that clearly have the wherewithal to secure private financing.

And as Don Boudreaux, one of our resident economists, reminds, Ex-Im satisfies “not the demands of consumers spending their own money but, instead, the demands of politicians and bureaucrats spending other people's money.”

In a word, the Export-Import Bank — its renewal fate now in the hands of what could be an equally ignorant Senate — is a crock, an 81-year-old contrivance of capitalists crony, not free-market. And members of Congress, Republican and Democrat, who support such an artifice deserve their constituents' scorn.