Massachusetts senator went to DC to fight for families, but she may end up backing corporations.
Shikha Dalmia
USA Today
9/29/2014
Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts rode to Washington — and progressive icon status – by promising “to work for the middle class and working families every chance I get” and, unlike Mitt Romney and other Republican corporate lackeys, ensure that “we don’t run this country for corporations, we run it for people.” So one would think that she would be the one leading the charge against the government-funded Export-Import bank that even President Obama once described as “little more than … corporate welfare.”
In fact, it was Tea Party Republicans who fought to scrap this relic of the Great Depression when its term was set to expire at the end of this month – and Warren who said she was on the side of the bank’s corporate beneficiaries…
…But if the bank’s record in helping small businesses is pathetic, its job creation record is downright abysmal. The bank claims that last year its $27.3 billion activities helped sustain 205,000 export-related American jobs. This calculation is based on a dubious methodology that has been questioned by the Government Accountability Office. But even if one accepts it, Veronique de Rugy of George Mason University’s Mercatus Center notes, this works out to $131,200 in taxpayer exposure for every job sustained.
If the country must take on debt, wouldn’t it behoove Warren, the self-proclaimed progressive champion of ordinary Americans to do so, say, to finance middle-class tax cuts rather than corporate boondoggles?…
Read the entire article at USA Today.
