Many liberal writers agree that our government shouldn’t be subsidizing Wall Street lenders, foreign buyers, and major U.S. manufacturers through taxpayer-backed financing for exports — but they still can’t bring themselves to side with those filthy Tea Partiers trying to kill the Export-Import Bank.
Washington Post columnist Steven Pearlstein can’t really defend Ex-Im, but he declares it “disappointing” that conservatives are waging their anti-corporate welfare debate on the battlefield of Ex-Im. Why? Because he sees other corporate welfare programs as worse — the Small Business Administration, crop subsidies, crop-insurance subsidies, ethanol mandate, federal flood insurance, shipping subsidies, corporate tax loopholes, and so on.
Here’s the thing. Jeb Hensarling, who’s leading the fight against Ex-Im, also led the fight against excessive flood-insurance subsidies. Conservatives who oppose Ex-Im tend to oppose all these other corporate welfare programs. I sure have attacked most of those programs, and never supported any of them.
But, as Pearlstein points out, Ex-Im expires on September 30. That means it can be killed without having to pass a bill killing it. That seems to answer Pearlstein’s question, and ought to make Pearlstein more of a Hensarling cheerleader on Ex-Im than a pox-on-both-parties guy, as he is in this column.
But Yuval Levin explains it all better, even if I disagree with the first line:
If I oppose corporate welfare programs A-through-Z, and focus on program E because there’s an opportunity to kill it, how does a columnist like Pearlstein criticize me for NOT at that precise moment, talking about A-D and F-Z?
