Business

5 Things to Know About the Fight Over the Export-Import Bank

Published

9 years ago

July 28, 2015

A man walks out of the Export-Import Bank of the U.S., Tuesday, July 28, 2015, in Washington. The federal Export-Import Bank expired June 30 when Congress failed to renew its charter. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

ERICA WERNER, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — The federal Export-Import Bank expired June 30 when Congress failed to renew its charter. The bank is a small federal agency that helps U.S. companies sell their products overseas, by underwriting loans to foreign customers. Conservatives oppose it as corporate welfare and are pushing to keep it dead. But late Monday the Senate voted 64-29 to add legislation reviving the bank to a sweeping highway bill being considered on the floor.

Five things to know about the Export-Import Bank and its future:

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PATH AHEAD

Despite the Senate’s action on a measure to revive the bank and extend it through 2019, its future is far from assured. The House announced plans Tuesday to pass a three-month highway extension that does not include an Export-Import Bank provision — and then adjourn for the summer. That means the bank will stay shuttered at least into the fall, when Congress returns from its annual August recess.

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NOT DEAD YET

Even though the bank’s charter expired at the end of June, it remains in business to service more than $100 billion in outstanding loans and guarantees. The agency itself is funded, including employee salaries, through Sept. 30.

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DEBATE ABOUT THE BANK’S ROLE

Conservatives say the Export-Import Bank amounts to corporate welfare, pointing out that the companies that benefit include major corporations like Boeing, Caterpillar and GE which they say can support themselves without taxpayers’ help.

But supporters of the bank, including groups like the Chamber of Commerce and National Association of Manufacturers, point out that most other countries have export credit agencies, in some cases more generous than the U.S. version. Supporters say it will be harder for U.S. companies to compete overseas if their competitors are supported by the government and they aren’t.

The bank says that last year it authorized $20 billion worth of transactions which supported $27.5 billion of U.S. exports and 164,000 U.S. jobs. And it says it has a default rate of less than 1 percent.

Opponents argue that the bank mostly helps big businesses. Of the $20.5 billion in financing and insurance authorized by the bank in 2014, just over $5 billion of that was for small business exporters, according to bank officials. But if the transactions themselves are counted up, more small businesses are helped than big ones. It’s just that the amounts spent on them are smaller.

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RIFE WITH POLITICS

In past years the bank was renewed with little or no controversy and sometimes without so much as a roll-call vote. But after a tea party-infused GOP majority retook the House in 2010, conservatives began seizing on the bank as crony capitalism and a federal agency ripe for elimination, making a 2012 reauthorization vote a struggle for the first time.

Outside groups like Club for Growth and Heritage Action for America made it an issue, and this year, with Republicans in control of the Senate and a presidential campaign underway, conservatives have targeted the Export-Import Bank even more assertively.

Adding to the pressure, the billionaire GOP Koch Brothers took on the cause through their allied organizations Americans for Prosperity and Freedom Partners, pressuring GOP presidential candidates who are jockeying for the Kochs’ coveted financial backing to toe the line.

The issue provoked extraordinary GOP infighting in the Senate in recent days as presidential candidate Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, accused Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., of lying to him about whether there was a deal to revive the bank. McConnell disputed the accusation.

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81-YEAR HISTORY

The bank was created by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1934, during the Great Depression. His aim was to help the U.S. “re-engage economically with the rest of the world,” according to the State Department historian. The bank was initially established to help trade with the Soviet Union, and a second version was meant to boost trade with Cuba, but the two entities were soon merged and began extending efforts around the globe.

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Activism

Bay Area Soda Taxes Don’t Just Affect Sales: They Help Change People’s Minds

Published

2 hours ago

December 29, 2024

Oakland Post

In the years since voters in several Bay Area cities supported raising taxes on sugar-sweetened beverages like sodas, some juices and sports drinks, UC Berkeley researchers say the norms around those drinks have changed significantly. Photo by Emmanuel Edward/Unsplash.

UC Berkeley researchers found that taxes on sugar-sweetened beverages, coupled with media attention, coincided with significant changes in social norms around sugary drinks.

By Jason Pohl
UC Berkeley News

It wasn’t that long ago when cigarettes and soda were go-to convenience store vices, glamorized in movies and marketed toward, well, everyone.

Then, lawmakers and voters raised taxes on cigarettes, and millions of dollars went into public education campaigns about smoking’s harms. Decades of news coverage chronicled how addictive and dangerous cigarettes were and the enormous steps companies took to hide the risks and hook more users.

The result: a radical shift in social norms that made it less acceptable to smoke and pushed cigarette use to historic lows, especially among minors.

New UC Berkeley research suggests sugar-sweetened beverages may be on a similar path.

The city of Berkeley’s first-in-the-nation soda tax a decade ago, along with more recent Bay Area tax increases on sugar-sweetened drinks, have not only led to reduced sales. They are also associated with significant changes in social norms and attitudes about the healthfulness of sweet drinks, said Kristine A. Madsen, a professor at UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health and senior author of a paper published Nov. 25 in the journal BMC Public Health.

Over the span of just a few years, taxes coupled with significant media attention significantly affected the public’s overall perceptions of sugar-sweetened beverages, which include sodas, some juices, and sports drinks. Such a shift in the informal rules surrounding how people think and act could have major implications for public health efforts more broadly, Madsen said.

“Social norms are really powerful. The significant shift we saw in how people are thinking about sugary drinks demonstrates what else we could do,” Madsen said. “We could reimagine a healthier food system. It starts with people thinking, ‘Why drink so much soda?’ But what if we also said, ‘Why isn’t most of the food in our grocery stores food that makes us healthy?’”

Madsen and colleagues from UC San Francisco and UC Davis analyzed surveys from 9,128 people living in lower-income neighborhoods in Berkeley, Oakland, San Francisco, and Richmond. Using data from 2016 to 2019 and 2021, they studied year-to-year trends in people’s perception of sugar-sweetened beverages.

They wanted to understand how the four taxes in the Bay Area might have affected social norms surrounding sugary beverages — the unwritten and often unspoken rules that influence the food and drinks we buy, the clothes we wear and our habits at the dinner table.

Although social norms aren’t visible, they are incredibly powerful forces on our actions and behaviors; just ask anyone who has bought something after an influencer promoted it on TikTok or Instagram.

Researchers asked questions about how often people thought their neighbors drank sodas, sports drinks, and fruity beverages. Participants also rated how healthy several drinks were, which conveyed their own attitudes about the beverages.

The researchers found a 28% decline in the social acceptability of drinking sugar-sweetened beverages.

In Oakland, positive perceptions of peers’ consumption of sports drinks declined after the tax increase, relative to other cities. Similarly, in San Francisco, attitudes about the healthfulness of sugar-sweetened fruit drinks also declined.

In other words, people believed their neighbors weren’t drinking as many sugar-sweetened beverages, which affected their own interest in consuming soda, juices, and sports drinks.

“What it means when social norms change is that people say, ‘Gosh, I guess we don’t drink soda. That’s just not what we do. Not as much. Not all the time,’” Madsen said. “And that’s an amazing shift in mindsets.”

The research is the latest from UC Berkeley that examines how consumption patterns have changed in the decade since Berkeley implemented the nation’s first soda tax.

A 2016 study found a decrease in soda consumption and an increase in people turning to water. Research in 2019 documented a sharp decline in people turning to sugar-sweetened drinks. And earlier this year, Berkeley researchers documented that sugar-sweetened beverage purchases declined dramatically and steadily across five major American cities after taxes were put in place.

The penny-per-ounce tax on beverages, which is levied on distributors of sugary drinks — who ultimately pass that cost of doing business on to consumers — is an important means of communicating about health with the public, Madsen said.

Researchers tallied more than 700 media stories about the taxes on sugar-sweetened beverages during the study period. That level of messaging was likely a major force in driving public awareness and norms.

It’s also something Madsen said future public health interventions must consider. It was part of the progress made in cutting cigarette smoking and seems to be working with sugary drinks. And it’s those interventions that can lead to individual action.

“If we change our behaviors, the environment follows,” Madsen said. “While policy really matters and is incredibly important, we as individuals have to advocate for a healthier food system.”

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Bay Area

Richmond Dispensary First in Contra Costa County to Operate ‘Full Time’

“Full time” means the dispensary located on Pierce Street at Central in the Richmond Annex neighborhood is now open for the maximum number of hours allowed by the California Department of Cannabis Control. In fact, 7 Stars is the first dispensary in Contra Costa County to be open full time.

Published

2 hours ago

December 29, 2024

Oakland Post

The 7 Stars Holistic Healing Center is located on Pierce Street at Central in the Richmond Annex neighborhood. Photo courtesy The Richmond Standard.

The Richmond Standard

Richmond cannabis dispensary 7 Stars Holistic Healing Center recently marked a milestone by expanding its hours of operation to “full time,” from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m., seven days per week.

“When people search for a cannabis dispensary near them that is open now, we want to be sure we’re not missing an opportunity to serve our guests,” says Joe Dayem, executive officer. “By being open full-time, we’ve increased the likelihood that we will be available to provide safe access to cannabis for our guests, which has been our goal since day one.”

For more information, visit www.7starshhc.com.