FLORIDA: At least, that’s what lobbyists in Washington predicted would happen after the Export-Import Bank expired on June 30. Over the past decade, this little-known federal agency handed out more than $200 billion in taxpayer-backed financing to businesses, supporting only 1.8 percent of Florida’s exports along the way. Many of those companies claimed the sky would fall if Congress didn’t keep the taxpayer money flowing.
At midnight June 30, the bank expired, which means it can’t offer new taxpayer-backed financing to companies. And the sky didn’t fall, either in Florida or anywhere else in America.
Here’s why. The Export-Import Bank uses tens of billions of dollars every year to support less than two percent of America’s exporters. The other 98 percent more than 300,000 companies don’t get this taxpayer-financed help.
