Ex-Im Backs $16 Billion in Loans for State-Owned Corporations

Proponents of the Export-Import Bank, like Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), claim the corporate welfare bank is essential for protecting American jobs, but a new Heritage Action analysis of Export-Impot Bank annual reports show that $16 billions worth of loans have gone to state-owned foreign airlines since 2009 alone.

The Export-Import Bank has inked deals with 34 with foreign government owned corporations since 2009, including deals with China, Egypt, and Kazakhstan.

The biggest of the loan guarantees, at more than $2 billion, went to the National Aviation Co. of India for commercial aircrafts from Boeing, which just happens to be the banks biggest corporate welfare customer. Air China has also signed deals worth $1.8 billion with the Export-Import Bank since 2011.

Defenders of the Export-Import Bank, like Warren, claim the coporate welfare program creates American jobs. But whatever jobs are created for subsidized corporations are just lost elsewhere by non-subsidized American businesses.

This is why President Ronald Reagan proposed shrinking the Export-Import Bank saying at the time, "We’re doing this because the primary beneficiaries of taxpayer funds in this case are the exporting companies themselves–most of them profitable corporations."

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Over 75 percent of all Export-Import corporate welfare subsidies go to large corporations, not small businesses.

And the corporate welfare bank is set to cost taxpayers more than $2 billion over the next ten years while bank officials are being investigated for fraud and corruption.

If the Progressive movement and their Democratic Party want to become the part of corporatism, then conservatives and the Republican Party must offer the American people an alternative by fighting corporate welfare in all its forms, including the Export-Import bank.