The New York Times carries a gloom-and-doom news piece today on a Cameroonian water project and a small business in California.
Without taxpayer-backed financing from the Export-Import Bank, this project could fall through. Clear away the atmospherics in this piece, including the dark threat of a Chinese company, and the real story emerges: General Electric, the contractor on this project, says that if Ex-Im doesn’t subsidize this deal, GE will move its manufacturing to Canada or Hungary, “where the company has other plants supported by those countries’ credit agencies.”
There’s an irony to GE’s threat to move jobs overseas if Uncle Sam doesn’t provide subsidies through Ex-Im: GE has actually used Ex-Im subsidies in the past to move manufacturing from Bloomington, Indiana, to Mexico.
As those Bloomington workers were getting laid off, back in 2005, I reported:
As one of laid-off workers, Joe Adams, said about this deal: “Well, that’s just great. My taxes are paying to ship my job to Mexico.”
