Last week's hearing on trade promotion authority in the Senate Finance Committee is once again the source for a featured quote.  Senator Maria Cantwell (D-WA) talked about a lot of things in her few minutes of questions.  She talked about trade adjustment assistance, about training, including apprentice programs, and about the need for more trade agreements. But the issue she addressed most forcefully and most effectively, at least to our ears, was that of the Export-Import Bank.  Indeed, Senator Cantwell's Ex-Im request to Tom Donohue of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce was (for us) one of the highlights of the hearing.

We will come back to that exchange with Tom Donohue in a moment.  First, though, here is more of what she said about Boeing and American aerospace:

Implicit in that statement is the concern that if Congress allows the Ex-Im to go out of business - as many politicians seem to want - it is going to be a lot harder for Boeing to keep winning orders, especially against strong competition from Airbus and the export credit agencies behind it. 

Here is more from Senator Cantwell's exchange with Tom Donohue:

 
  

We do not have the time or space for a full discussion of the Ex-Im Bank issue.  Suffice it to say that it is urgent.  If the Bank's current charter is not re-authorized by the end of June, the Bank will go out of business.  That's the issue.  We will not get into probabilities here, but we will make a few observations. 

According to a chart on the Ex-Im Bank website, aerospace accounts for roughly 29 percent of the Bank's activities, and we'll assume that most of that is Boeing.  We share Senator Cantwell's view that there is nothing to be ashamed of in that number and a lot to be proud of.  We would add that trying to parse U.S. exports between those of large companies and those of small and medium-sized companies is a fool's game.  Yes, there are smaller companies which export on their own, and that is great.  But there are thousands upon thousands of smaller companies whose principal customers are large exporting firms, like Boeing.  Should those "indirect" exports not count?  We think they count.

Lobbying - Boeing and Delta.  The New York Times ran a fascinating article on Delta's efforts to deny Ex-Im support to Boeing's foreign customers, especially those that compete with Delta.  Such an argument strikes us as madness.  Ex-Im has already tied itself in too many knots.  U.S. exporters, for example, would almost certainly have gotten much more business from China's Three Gorges Dam project but for the environmental policy restrictions on the U.S. Export-Import Bank.

Presumably, anyone who is in business hopes that whatever he buys-airplanes or anything else-will help him compete.  It is hard to imagine anything more absurd than asking Ex-Im to deny credit on the basis of the fact that the product at issue might give the buyer a competitive advantage.  It should be enough that it helps an American exporter.   (If memory serves, there are situations in which this is already the case, but that is no reason to compound the problem further.)

Of Philosophy and the Politics.  We understand the concern expressed by leading politicians about bloated government and "corporate welfare."  And we presume that, as a Democrat, Senator Cantwell is not rooting for any of the Republican candidates.  Even so, the advice she is offering them is good advice.  The demise of Ex-Im Bank may be unlikely, but there is something that is much, much more unlikely, namely this:  that Congress could kill Ex-Im without affecting the competitiveness of American aerospace.  That's an albatross no one should want to carry into an election.