Dana Milbank says that it shows that the Republicans have gone crazy.
Conservative groups howling about corporate welfare and big government have, for the moment, bested the corporate interests that have previously co-opted grass-roots conservatives.
And he thinks that this is a bad thing.
Meanwhile, Tim Carney writes,
So why would Ex-Im agree to subsidize exports that had already been made, shipped, and installed? This seems odd if Ex-Im was trying to support U.S. jobs at Solyndra. It makes sense if Ex-Im was trying to change the financing of an existing export, so as to shore up Solyndra’s financing. In other words, Ex-Im may not have helped Solyndra make a sale (which is what it is supposed to do), but it may have slowed down Solyndra’s cash-flow trainwreck — a crucial objective for the Obama administration, which had stuck out its neck holding up Solyndra as the poster company for the new subsidized green economy.
Ex-Im seems to me to be another one of those issues, like housing policy, on which conservative economists have it right and the prominent left-leaning economists are silent.
There comes a time for most politically sponsored and perpetuated ideas – – to go.
Milbank et al. maintain that the Ex-Im Bank is turning a nice profit for the US government. I assume that he’s among those who believe in the unbridled rapacity of Big Finance, and that only government regulation keeps the banking industry from branching out into the field of snatching children off the street and selling their kidneys. Why, then, have the greedy CEO’s ignored the profits to be made by competing with the Ex-Im Bank? The only answer I can come up with is that they’re not interested in money alone: they’re out to advance the cause of Evil, and they’d incur the contumely of their peers if they made a profit by honest means. Why, then, don’t social-responsibility funds go into the business? Harder to answer that, but I’m sure that it can all be explained in terms of corporate greed…
Sometimes silence speaks more than words.