Foreign companies build factories and airlines; Ex-Im makes the US pay for it

General Electric closed an appliance factory in Bloomington, Indiana, last year. The most luxurious of the GE refrigerators Hoosiers used to make there are now made in Mexico, and have been for many years. GE's factory complex in Mexico was subsidized years ago by the U.S. Export-Import Bank, a federal agency.

You could say that Mexico built a factory and made the U.S. pay for it.

President Trump, during the primary, said that he agreed with conservatives that Ex-Im, which extends taxpayer-backed financing to foreign companies and governments that buy U.S. goods, should be abolished.

Last week, however, Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, D-N.D., a champion of Ex-Im, emerged from a White House meeting declaring that Trump was now an Ex-Im supporter, and that he would push Congress to fill out the agency's board, thus empowering Ex-Im to approve subsidized deals of greater than $10 million.

This would be a mistake. Trump ran promising to drain the swamp. Ex-Im is the swamp. Touted as a way to help the small businessman or factory worker, it instead serves primarily to enrich foreign companies and Beltway insiders, while harming the rest of the economy.

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