Here’s a half-serious question: How much do taxpayers have to pay off Boeing to make the Export-Import Bank finally and irrevocably go away? If the feds wrote a check to Boeing for $100 million, would they then let the Ex-Im Bank fade away after the current portfolio winds down?
I ask this because the aerospace giant is the largest beneficiary of the Ex-Im Bank. The bank provides subsidized loans and insurance contracts to foreign companies that buy American exports. Ex-Im Bank doles out billions of dollars of loans and insurance subsidies every year and has become the poster child for corporate cronyism in Washington.



Think of the bank as food stamps for America’s Fortune 500 companies. Ever since the early Reagan years, conservatives have been trying to eliminate the subsidies, but the bank has multiple lives.
To listen to firms like General Electric, Boeing and Caterpillar, you’d think all of America’s exports would grind to a halt without it. That’s absurd.