Dr. Conca reports that Congress is in a fight about re-authorizing the Export-Import Bank of the United States (Ex-Im Bank). Washington Tea Party leaders want to kill it. Reasonable lawmakers, including a bipartisan majority in the House and Senate, want to keep it.
If you have never heard of the Ex-Im Bank, this might not seem like much of a crisis. But the law authorizing the Export-Import Bank is set to expire on June 30th, and America will lose about $50 billion a year in export revenue and over 250,000 jobs (2013 Report).
The Export-Import Bank provides financing for foreign customers to purchase goods and services from U.S. companies. The Ex-Im Bank is one of our few tools for increasing exports and creating jobs here at home. The Ex-Im Bank does not cost taxpayers anything. There are no subsidies, no tax breaks, no financial aid of any sort.
Although making loans sounds risky, Ex-Im Bank financing exposes the U.S. taxpayer to very low risk because its loans are diversified across business sectors and regions, owed to the U.S. and often collateralized with the goods being exported. In fact, because the Ex-Im Bank collects fees from its customers, it earns profit for the U.S. taxpayer. Over the past two decades, the Ex-Im Bank has contributed $7 billion to the U.S. Treasury general fund.
The nuclear industry is particularly affected by our Export-Import Bank for multiple reasons. First, exports are essential to our nuclear industry, because a new reactor has not come online in the United States in nearly two decades and only five are under construction here in America.
By comparison, 67 reactors are under construction outside the United States and another 170 are firmly planned, says Ted Jones, Director of International Supplier Relations at the Nuclear Energy Institute. The U.S. can gain over $700 billion from this global surge over the next ten years, but only if Ex-Im is left alone to do its job.
Read on for the other reasons..
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