In case my headline is unclear, I’m not calling James Fallows’ article on the Export-Import Bank “idiotic,” or saying it engages in “11th-grade” reasoning, or characterizing his mindset as a “flat-Earth” mindset. I also don’t believe that Fallows knows nothing.
President Barack Obama talks to journalists during a meeting with small business leaders to discuss the importance of the reauthorization of the Export-Import Bank, at the White House in Washington July 22, 2015. Reuters
That would be juvenile of me and would betray a fundamental weakness of my argument.
Those words in my headline describe not the nature, but the contentsof Fallows’ article — those are the words he uses to “argue” against the critcs of taxpayer subsidies for Boeing, General Electric, JPMorgan, and other U.S. exporters and lenders.
It’s characteristic of the genre of Ex-Im defenses in that it mostly does two things: (1) expresses angry disbelief that anyone could oppose this corporate welfare program; and (2) cites some subsidy recipients saying they really like these subsidies.
- Name-calling
- Factual error
In paragraph 2, Fallows cites a FreedomWorks ad, describing FreedomWorks as a “Koch brothers-originated lobbying group”. (The Kochs fund many groups, including some that have paid me for speeches and the like, but they don’t fund FreedomWorks. A decade ago, FreedomWorks broke off of a Koch-funded group.)
- Misleading guilt by association
Fallows then writes that the argument that “that big, rich companies like Boeing or GE should not depend on taxpayer help for financing their sales to customers overseas” only makes sense to 11th-grade devotees to Ayn Rand. This is odd, considering that all sorts of liberalsmake this argument too.
But here are some others that Fallows apparently imagines is part of this Junior Year Ayn Rand seminar: the Congressional Research Service (“Most economists doubt … that a nation can improve its welfare over the long run by subsidizing exports”), economists Kyle Bagwell and Robert Staiger (“such policies at best introduce costly domestic distortions into the economy and at worst cause a deterioration in the terms-of-trade as well”), economist Michael Strain, former top White House advisor Keith Hennessey, and most other economists who have opined on the matter.
So this is just more
- Misleading guilt by association
Why does Fallows reject the near consensus of economists that export subsidies hurt the subsidizing country’s economy? Because other countries, including China and Japan “are happy to promote their own exporters.” We’ve long known Fallows’ envy of Japan’s industrial policy. Fallows wrote in the 1980s that “Japan and its acolytes, such as Taiwan and Korea, have demonstrated that in head-on industrial competition between free-trading societies and capitalist developmental states, the free traders will eventually lose.”
But Fallows never addresses the well known and strong argumentsagainst this “China-is-doing-it-too” stance. His argument literally boils down to, we should subsidize our exporters because other countries are doing it too. I think this requires more substantiation. Instead of an argument, Fallows, in effect, trots out a GE press release, pointing to GE’s claim that it is moving jobs overseas because of a lack of Ex-Im financing.
- Argument from subsidized authority
GE’s claims of job transfers over Ex-Im’s expiration should be taken with a grain of salt. I wrote about how GE’s other recent claims to this effect are deeply suspect. In short, the transferred jobs (a) don’t exist, (b) may never materialize in France, and (c) may have already been promised to France.
But also, it’s a weird way to argue for subsidies: to never engage the opponents’ arguments (but merely call them “idiotic,” “flat-earth,” “know-nothing,” and to swallow wholesale the claims of the subsidized. The rest of Fallows’ article carries on this way — citing the claims of the subsidized corporations and calling the skeptics names.
It’s not the sort of argument you’d expect from someone who has the facts or economic reasoning on his side. It is the sort of argument you’d expect from someone who only has powerful lobbyist on his side.
Timothy P. Carney, The Washington Examiner’s senior political columnist, can be contacted at tcarney@washingtonexaminer.com. His column appears Tuesday and Thursday nights on washingtonexaminer.com.
from AEI » Latest Content http://ift.tt/1Po2vEl
0 التعليقات:
Post a Comment