Category: Uncategorized

WSJ: The Folly of Targeting Big Pharma

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

An unfortunate refrain among Democratic presidential hopefuls is that rapacious pharmaceutical and biotech companies are driving up the cost of essential medications, bankrupting the health-care system, and depriving sick Americans of treatment. Hillary Clinton has honed her message to a nice sound bite: Drug companies that charge excessively high prices “are making a fortune off of people’s misfortune.”

A report released Dec. 2 by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services shows a 12.2% increase in spending on prescription drugs in 2014 after an average 2% increase for the previous six years. As the CMS report clearly states, “the rapid growth in 2014 was due to increased spending for new medications (particularly for specialty drugs such as hepatitis C).” Yet the increase, combined with reports of drug companies attempting to jack up prices on existing drugs, has some calling for full-blown government price controls.

The way we pay for innovative drugs can certainly be improved. But the anger directed at the pharmaceutical and biotech industries overall is misdirected. The single biggest driving force for increased health-care spending in the U.S. is the rising cost of labor, not drugs. According to data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis and estimates by the Progressive Policy Institute, total labor compensation at hospitals, doctors’ offices, ambulatory care facilities and nursing homes has risen by roughly $270 billion since 2007, including the amount paid to doctors and dentists who own their own practices.

Continue reading at the Wall Street Journal.

The 2015 PPI Tech/Info Job Ranking

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

This policy brief reports the top 25 tech counties in the country, based on the 2015 PPI Tech/Info Job Index.

The top three counties are in the Bay Area—first is San Francisco Country, followed by Santa Clara County (Silicon Valley), and San Mateo County. Travis County, home of Austin, Texas, takes fourth place, with Utah County (Provo, Utah) ranking fifth.

The top 25 list also includes well-known tech hubs such as King County (Seattle), New York County (New York City), Middlesex County (Cambridge, Mass.) and Suffolk County (Boston). However, the PPI Tech/Info Job Index also identifies some unexpectedly strong performers, including East Baton Rouge Parish (Baton Rouge, La.) and St. Charles County (St. Louis, Mo. Metro Area).

This is the third year that we have ranked counties by the PPI Tech/Info Job Index, which is based on the number of jobs added in their tech/info industries from 2011 to 2014, relative to the size of the local economy. PPI defines the tech/info sector as including telecom, tech, and content industries, including wired and wireless telecom, Internet search and publishing, and movie production (see complete list of included industries in the methodology section).

As in previous years, we find that the local economies with the highest PPI Tech/Info Job Index tend to have a faster growth rate of non-tech jobs. This result supports the proposition that benefits from a strong tech/info sector spill over to the rest of the local economy.

Download “2015.12-Mandel-Di-Ionno_The-2015-PPI-Tech-Info-Job-Ranking”

Innovation in a Rules-Bound World: How Regulatory Improvement Can Spur Growth

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Economists and policymakers are always lauding innovation. In its purest form, innovation is like a free lunch: it boosts growth and incomes, creates good jobs, and opens up new possibilities for social reform and social mobility.

Today, innovation is needed more than ever. Productivity growth has been slowing in recent years. The 10-year growth rate of nonfarm business labor productivity is only 1.3 percent in 2015, compared to 3 percent as recently as 2005. A full one percentage point of that 1.7 percentage point decline, or more than half, is due to a slowdown in the growth rate of multifactor productivity, an indicator of innovation. In other words, the economic evidence suggests that this is an era of relatively weak innovation, outside of information technology.

Indeed, encouraging innovation is more essential than ever before. Fortunately, industries such as health care, education, finance, and tech are attempting to adopt new technologies that offer the chance of faster growth and higher wages, desperately needed to overcome years of stagnation.

But regulators, both in Washington, and at the state and local level, struggle with a rapid pace of innovation. Innovation, especially disruptive innovation, embodies unpredictability, change, and the creation of new products and markets. By contrast, regulators thrive on rules and predictability. They maintain a process of identifying an existing market failure and then issuing regulations that aims to make consumers and society better off by correcting that failure. The regulation process is far more straightforward when markets change slowly and predictably.

Download “2015.12-Mandel_Carew_Innovation-in-a-Rules-Bound-World-How-Regulatory-Improvement-Can-Spur-Growth”

U.S. News & World Report: Engaging Families to Help Students Succeed

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Everyone in public education knows that what happens at home is more important than what happens at school. Hence, many successful schools work to engage parents (or their substitutes) in their children’s education. Indeed, many of the nation’s best charter schools have long sent teachers to visit their students’ homes and asked parents to sign contracts that commit them to supporting the education of their children.

Lately some of the nation’s more innovative school districts have begun to emulate this practice. In Denver, Colorado and Washington, D.C., family engagement has become an important element of district strategy.

In Washington, the effort is led by a nonprofit organization, the Flamboyan Foundation. Kristin Ehrgood, its founder and president, is an alumnus of Teach for America who went on to run the organization in New Jersey, then served on the Teach for America board in D.C. In 2006 she and her husband created the Flamboyan Foundation, and in 2008 they brought it to D.C. to invest in public education.

Before deciding where to focus, Ehrgood talked with a variety of people to figure out the most pressing needs in the city. Over and over, she heard the words “family engagement.”

So she and her staff read all the research, which says that family engagement is critical to student achievement. They also did focus groups and built “learning partnerships” with 11 D.C. schools, charter and traditional.

Continue reading at U.S. News & World Report.

WSJ: Small Businesses With a Big Stake in the Pacific Trade Deal

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

During the seven years that the Trans-Pacific Partnership was being negotiated, critics repeatedly claimed that the trade agreement wouldn’t be about trade or cutting tariffs but, instead, would primarily advance the special interests of large multinationals. Economist Joseph Stiglitz, for example, warned that the TPP could “benefit the wealthiest sliver of the American and global elite at the expense of everyone else.”

The negotiations are now over, and the full text of the agreement, released on Nov. 5, tells a different story. Notably, the agreement includes groundbreaking provisions that better enable smaller businesses to prosper by exporting to the 12 countries that are in the partnership. The growing markets in these countries account for some 40% of the global economy.

Ninety-eight percent of America’s 300,000 exporters are small or medium-size enterprises (SMEs)—firms with fewer than 500 employees. Together they account for about a third of the $1.6 trillion in annual goods exports. And because only 5% of SMEs currently export, there’s a significant potential for growth.

Small businesses account for almost two-thirds of America’s net new jobs and—according to economists—are essential building blocks for economic mobility. Smaller firms that export are especially prolific creators of good jobs for diverse groups. Census Bureau data show that the average American women-owned exporter, for example, employs five times more workers and pays an average salary almost $17,000 more than women-owned non-exporters. Similarly, minority-owned exporters employ three times more workers and pay nearly $16,000 more.

Continue reading at the Wall Street Journal.

RealClearPolitics: What Obama Must Do in Syria

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Syria has become Barack Obama’s Iraq—a foreign policy debacle rooted in faulty assumptions about the utility of American power. Where George W. Bush overstated what U.S. military intervention could achieve in Iraq, Obama has underestimated the risks and costs of non-intervention in Syria.

The analogy will rankle many progressives, as well as conservative “realists” who have praised Obama’s doctrine of U.S. restraint. But any administration’s policies must be judged by their results, not the elegance of their conceptual underpinnings. And the results of Obama’s decision to stand aloof from the Syrian crisis have gone from bad to worse.

Despite declaring early on that Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad must go, Obama in 2012 overruled his national security team — including then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton — which urged him to train and equip moderate Syrian rebels not allied with jihadists groups. Having decided the previous year to pull all U.S. troops out of Iraq, Obama was not about to get sucked into Syria.

But power vacuums invite trouble, especially in the combustible Middle East. The Syrian caldron soon boiled over, morphing into a regional conflict as Iran and Hezbollah rushed to Assad’s rescue, while Saudi Arabia and Arab states came to the aid of Sunni rebels. Then came the hard-core Islamists of al-Qaeda and the even more fanatical spinoff, the Islamic State (commonly called Daesh), which proclaimed a new caliphate centered in Raqqa.

Continue reading at RealClearPolitics.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership and Small Business: Boosting Exports and Inclusive Growth

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

With the release of the full text of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), America now has an important—and extensive—opportunity to review the agreement’s actual terms. Critics are certain to reprise old arguments, including those that blame trade for economic disruptions whose origins often lie elsewhere. And they’ll offer newer criticisms, including the claim that TPP isn’t really about trade or cutting tariffs but, rather, is a scheme to advance the agenda of large multinational corporations.

This latest charge will likely be news to the hundreds of thousands of small and mid-sized American firms that currently export—and the growing numbers of small entrepreneurs who are seeking greater opportunity through trade. America’s smaller exporters will note that the TPP has made small business trade a key point of emphasis, and that it includes groundbreaking provisions to boost their ability to export to key TPP markets.

Increasing exports by U.S. small business can also be a vital opportunity to promote stronger—and more inclusive—economic growth. Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) that export have higher sales, hire more employees, and pay higher wages than non-exporting SMEs. And because exporters account for only about one percent of all U.S. SMEs, America has significant untapped potential to support growth, good jobs, and economic mobility through increased small business trade.

But to meet this potential, it’s vital for the United States to reduce the extensive and often onerous foreign trade barriers that often keep SME traders on the sidelines. High duties and costs, customs red tape, unnecessarily complex regulations, and other barriers negatively impact American exporters of all sizes, but they can loom particularly large for small entrepreneurs that lack the resources, personnel, contacts, and extensive support networks of bigger competitors.

In this policy brief, we first review the TPP agreement and explain how it would eliminate significant trade barriers to U.S. small business and enable more American SMEs to prosper by exporting to fast-growing Asia-Pacific markets. We then highlight how the TPP’s support for small business trade can play a vital, broader role, helping to boost the overall economy and “democratizing” trade by assuring that trade’s significant benefits are shared more widely by more Americans.

Download “2015.11-Gerwin_The-Trans-Pacific-Partnership-and-Small-Business_Boosting-Exports-and-Inclusive-Growth”

 

Washington Monthly: For More and Better Choices in Wireless Broadband, Government Should Give Up More Spectrum

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

“Buy land,” Will Rogers is famous for having said, “They’re not making any more of it.” But the same constraint applies to a similar resource – electromagnetic spectrum, the real estate on which the economy’s future will be built. This week, the powerful Senate Commerce Committee will take steps in addressing this modern-day conundrum. And the end result could lead to a more competitive Internet while helping to meet the Obama Administration’s goal of closing the “digital divide.”

Spectrum is the range of radio waves that can carry mobile signals – voice, image, data, whatever you want, digitally morphed. And like the land that supports structures, spectrum supports our phones and their apps, remote education and healthcare, environmental monitoring, security and law enforcement, mobile entertainment, games, and other amusements, as well as the burgeoning “Internet of things,” from driverless cars to refrigerators that order groceries.

These innovations (which support 1.3 million jobs and $400 billion in annual economic activity, according to The Brattle Group) come so rapidly and pervasively that we often forget that it is spectrum that allows them to exist. Like land, there is only so much of it – the physical world provides only so wide a range of radio wave frequencies. But in the same way that skyscrapers make better use of land, technology that allows improvements in signal strength and compression make better use of spectrum over time.

Continue reading at Washington Monthly.

Marshall on Appointments of Wall Street Veterans

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

To The Wall Street Journal‘s Nick Timiraos, PPI President Will Marshall defended the use of Wall Street appointees to high-level presidential administrative positions:

Some Democrats have faulted that approach. ‘The idea that you have to excommunicate anybody who ever worked in the financial sector is ridiculous,’ said Will Marshall, president of the Progressive Policy Institute, a centrist Democratic think tank. ‘We need people who oversee the Federal Reserve system and have high posts at Treasury that have expertise in finance.'”

Read the article in it’s entirety at The Wall Street Journal. 

PPI WEEKLY WRAP-UP: Agenda 2016, What Democrats Are Missing, and TPP’s Impact on Small Business

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

AGENDA 2016–REVIVING U.S. ECONOMIC GROWTH: The Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) teamed up with Columbia University’s Richard Paul Richman Center for Business, Law, and Public Policy to co-host a compelling symposium Nov. 6-7 in New York on revitalizing the U.S. economy. The event featured a distinguished roster of Richman Center economists and scholars, as well as PPI analysts and special guests, and more than two-dozen top policy aides to Members of Congress, Governors, and Mayors.

Held on Columbia’s Manhattan campus, the symposium examined the U.S. economy’s recent performance, as well as the causes of the long-term decline of productivity and economic growth. Against the backdrop of the 2016 election debate, the participants grappled with specific ideas for unleashing more economic innovation, modernizing infrastructure, reforming taxes, improving regulation, expanding trade and reducing inequality by ensuring that all children have access to high-quality public schools.

NEW DEMOCRATS SOUND ALARM: PPI President Will Marshall was quoted in a piece by The Guardian addressing the 2016 Democratic presidential candidates and the party’s shift to the left. “There is no question that the prevailing temper of the Democratic party is populist: strongly sceptical of what we like to call capitalism and angry about the perceived power of the monied elite in politics,” said PPI president and founder Will Marshall. “But inequality is not the biggest problem we face: it is symptomatic of the biggest problem we face, which is slow growth.”

WHAT DEMOCRATS ARE MISSING: In an op-ed for CNN, Marshall argues that Democrats must focus on economic growth and optimism leading into the 2016 election. “After their first debate in Las Vegas, Democrats congratulated themselves on having been more substantive than the Republicans. True enough: No sentient viewer could confuse the GOP Gong Show with the PBS NewsHour.

“But amid all the wonkery, something big was missing — a sense of economic optimism, buttressed by fresh ideas for stimulating innovation and growth. Working Americans want to know how they and their children can find opportunities and win in the global knowledge economy. Instead, Democrats dwelled at great length on how badly they are losing. They had plenty to say about inequality, but almost nothing about how to create new jobs, enterprises and wealth.”

PPI EUROPE ENGAGEMENT: Chief Economic Strategist Dr. Michael Mandel and Executive Director Lindsay Mark Lewis visited Paris, Brussels, and London last week, as PPI continues to engage with top European policy leaders on important economic issues across the pond, including Safe Harbor 2.0, digital trade, international taxation, encryption, copyright, and other growth issues. PPI is committed to building the transatlantic dialogue between the US and Europe, and this trip was a continuation of our desire to deepen our economic relationship.

TPP’S IMPACT ON SMALL BUSINESSES: Ed Gerwin, PPI Senior Fellow for Trade and Global Opportunity, was quoted by Quartz on how TPP will help small businesses interested in exporting their goods.  “TPP has a whole chapter on international e-commerce, and another on small- and medium-sized companies. …  the TPP ‘could be potentially transformative,’ Ed Gerwin, a trade expert at the Progressive Policy Institute, tells Quartz. ‘That stuff is a big deal,’ says Gerwin. ‘Having uniform rules is really important.’

Agenda 2016: Reviving U.S. Economic Growth

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) teamed up with Columbia University’s Richard Paul Richman Center for Business, Law, and Public Policy to co-host a compelling symposium Nov. 6-7 in New York on revitalizing the U.S. economy. The event featured a distinguished roster of Richman Center economists and scholars, as well as PPI analysts and special guests, and more than two-dozen top policy aides to Members of Congress, Governors, and Mayors.

Held on Columbia’s Manhattan campus, the symposium examined the U.S. economy’s recent performance, as well as the causes of the long-term decline of productivity and economic growth. Against the backdrop of the 2016 election debate, the participants grappled with specific ideas for unleashing more economic innovation, modernizing infrastructure, reforming taxes, improving regulation, expanding trade and reducing inequality by ensuring that all children have access to high-quality public schools.

The discussions, which were off-the-record to encourage maximum candor, featured the following speakers and topics:

  • An overview of the U.S. economy’s recent performance by Abby Joseph Cohen, President of the Global Markets Institute and Senior Investment Strategist at Goldman Sachs.
  • A roundtable on key elements of a high-growth strategy, led by Michael Mandel, Chief Economic Strategist at PPI, Andrew Stern, former head of the Service Employees International Union and now Ronald O. Perelman Senior Fellow at the Richman Center, and
Philip K. Howard, Founder of Common Good, a nonpartisan reform coalition. The conversation touched on ways to improve the regulatory environment for innovation, including reducing regulatory accumulation and requiring faster permitting for big infrastructure projects, as well as a lively debate on the future of work in a tech-driven knowledge economy.
  • An insightful macroeconomic analysis of why productivity and economic growth have slowed, by Pierre Yared, Associate Professor at the Columbia Business School and Co-director of the Richman Center. Yared highlighted three potential contributors to the slowdown: labor demographics and participation; “capital intensity” or business investment; and the “production efficiency” of U.S. companies.
  • A detailed examination of the impact of energy innovation—from the shale boom to renewables and the construction of a new, “smart” grid—on jobs and economic growth. Leading this segment were Jason Bordoff, formerly energy advisor to President Obama and Director of Columbia’s Center on Global Energy Policy, and Derrick Freeman, Director of PPI’s Energy Innovation Project.
  • A dinner conversation at the Columbia Club with Edmund Phelps, the 2006 Nobel Laureate in Economics and Director of Columbia’s Center on Capitalism and Society at Columbia University. Drawing on his recent book, Mass Flourishing: How Grassroots Innovation Created Jobs, Challenge and Change, he stressed the importance of indigenous innovation in creating the conditions for broad upward mobility. He also emphasized the crucial role of “modern” or individualistic cultural values in sustaining the mass innovation and entrepreneurship America needs to flourish again.
  • A detailed look at business taxation and reform as a potential driver of economic growth. It featured Michael Graetz, Alumni Professor of Tax Law at Columbia Law School, David Schizer, Dean Emeritus and the Harvey R. Miller Professor of Law and Economics at the Columbia Law School and Co-director at the Richman Center, as well as PPI’s Michael Mandel. The discussion ranged widely over global tax frictions, including the OECD’s new “BEPS” project; the need for corporate tax reform; “patent boxes” and mounting U.S. interest in consumption taxes.
  • A roundtable on trade and productivity growth with Ed Gerwin, PPI Senior Fellow for Trade and Global Opportunity and the versatile Michael Mandel. Noting President Obama’s controversial call for a Trans-Pacific Partnership, Gerwin stressed the agreement’s potential for “democratizing” trade by making it easier for U.S. small businesses to connect with customers abroad. Mandel underscored another PPI priority: raising awareness among policymakers of the growing contribution of cross-border data flows to growth here and abroad, and the need to push back against proposals that would impede “digital trade”
  • A luncheon presentation on “financial regulation after the crisis” by Jeffrey Gordon, Richard Paul Richman Professor of Law at Columbia Law School and Co-director of the Richman Center. Gordon described the new regime put in place by Dodd-Frank and other rules to guard against “systemic risk” of another financial meltdown, and suggested its “perimeter” may been to be expanded beyond banks.
  • The symposium’s final panel featured a vigorous discussion on K-12 education reform and the economy. The discussants were Jonah Rockoff, Associate Professor at the Columbia Business School and David Osborne, who directs PPI’s Reinventing America’s Schools Project, and is a co-author of the seminal “Reinventing Government.” Rockoff highlighted research showing that the returns to school improvement are enormous, and recommended reforms that could increase school quality. Osborne traced the evolution of school governance in America, and offered detailed looks at new models emerging in cities like New Orleans and Washington, D.C., both of which are leaders in the public charter school movement.

The symposium gave the policy professionals who participated a rare opportunity to delve deeply into complicated economic realities, guided by presenters of extraordinarily high caliber. The conversations were highly illuminating and will inform PPI’s work on Agenda 2016—a new blueprint for reviving U.S. economic dynamism and opportunity.

The Guardian: ‘New Democrats’ sound alarm over Sanders and Clinton’s leftward march

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

PPI President Will Marshall was quoted in a piece by The Guardian addressing the 2016 Democratic presidential candidates and the party’s shift to the left:

At Columbia University in New York this weekend, the Progressive Policy Institute, which helped Bill Clinton and Tony Blair pioneer so-called third way politics in the 1990s, held a closed-door strategy session for congressional staffers that was designed to find ways of promoting growth.

“There is no question that the prevailing temper of the Democratic party is populist: strongly sceptical of what we like to call capitalism and angry about the perceived power of the monied elite in politics,” said PPI president and founder Will Marshall.

“But inequality is not the biggest problem we face: it is symptomatic of the biggest problem we face, which is slow growth.”

Continue reading at The Guardian.

CNN: What Democrats should talk about Friday

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Compared to the Republicans’ presidential cattle calls, the next Democratic debate will be an intimate affair, since the field has shrunk to just three candidates. They will gather in South Carolina Friday for a “candidate forum” moderated by MSNBC’s uber-progressive Rachel Maddow.

That sounds like a recipe for another rousing round of populism, business-bashing and exhortations by Sen. Bernie Sanders to Americans to stop worrying and learn to love democratic socialism. If so, it will spell trouble for the candidate everyone expects to emerge with the prize — Hillary Clinton.

After their first debate in Las Vegas, Democrats congratulated themselves on having been more substantive than the Republicans. True enough: No sentient viewer could confuse the GOP Gong Show with the PBS NewsHour.

But amid all the wonkery, something big was missing — a sense of economic optimism, buttressed by fresh ideas for stimulating innovation and growth. Working Americans want to know how they and their children can find opportunities and win in the global knowledge economy. Instead, Democrats dwelled at great length on how badly they are losing. They had plenty to say about inequality, but almost nothing about how to create new jobs, enterprises and wealth.

Continue reading at CNN.

Mandel on Uber’s True Innovation

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

PPI’s Cheif Economic Strategist Michael Mandel was quoted by Sam Shead of Business Insider regarding the rise and impact of Uber:

Uber’s most significant innovation is not its widely-used taxi hailing app, an economist from a US think-tank said on Tuesday.

Speaking at the FT Innovate conference in London, Michael Mandel, chief economic strategist at the Progressive Policy Institute in Washington DC, suggested that ‘Uber’s real innovation has been in working with governments around the world’ where it has been ‘outstanding.’

Read the article in its entirety at Business Insider. 

Quartz: The TPP could help tiny companies become global exporters

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Ed Gerwin, PPI Senior Fellow for Trade and Global Opportunity, was quoted by Ana Campoy of Quartz talking about the importance and influence of Obama’s proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership:

Aside from the lower tariffs that are part of any run-of-the-mill trade agreement, TPP has a whole chapter on international e-commerce, and another on small- and medium-sized companies. The specific provisions of the pact have not been released yet, but a public summary of its contents shows that the TPP ‘could be potentially transformative,’ Ed Gerwin, a trade expert at the Progressive Policy Institute, tells Quartz.

For example, the treaty promises to speed up the process of getting merchandise across borders by making import rules more easily accessible and transparent. If the agreement is approved, express packages would be expedited and customs officials would be encouraged to adopt time-saving measures such as electronic forms and signatures.

‘That stuff is a big deal,’ says Gerwin. ‘Having uniform rules is really important.’”

Read the article in its entirety at Quartz.

How the Ex-Im Bank Serves Main Street

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

On real Main Streets across America, from Idaho to California to Maine, the Ex-Im Bank supports U.S. jobs.

On Main Streets across America, small businesses are a critical source of economic growth and good jobs. Over the past two decades, entrepreneurs and small firms have generated an astounding 65 percent of America’s net new jobs. Small businesses that export drive even greater growth.

According to shipping firm UPS, small firms engaged in global trade are 20 percent more productive and produce 20 percent greater job growth when compared to non-exporters. And because only about 4 percent of U.S. small businesses export, boosting small business trade can pay huge dividends for local communities and the overall American economy.

U.S. Export-Import Bank plays a key role in helping American small businesses seize export opportunities in foreign markets. Over the past four years, it has completed over 12,000 financing transactions for small firms—supporting nearly $50 billion in small business exports and well over 100,000 small business jobs—and has hosted over 75 small business export forums in communities nationwide. In 2014, 90 percent of the Ex-Im Bank’s transactions benefitted small businesses.

Despite this, critics like House Financial Services Chairman Jeb Hensarling (R-TX) have suggested that gutting the Ex-Im Bank would somehow be a victory for the “Main Street competitive economy.”

In real “Main Street” communities across America, however, small businesses and workers that have benefitted from Ex-Im Bank financing support would certainly disagree. Indeed, more than a few of the small firms that the Ex-Im Bank has supported in recent years are actually located on “Main Streets” across America. Here are just a few examples:

The Ex-Im Bank provides these and many other local companies with the real-world help they need to grow, support their communities, and create good jobs by selling globally. For instance, Ex-Im Bank loan guarantees enable NOW International, a small producer of dietary supplements in Bloomingdale, Illinois and Sparks, Nevada, to gain financial backing from local lenders for exports that directly support 35 jobs at the company.

And the benefits of Ex-Im support for larger companies like Boeing also flow to the thousands of U.S. suppliers and workers that participate in large company supply chains, including businesses that line the “Main Streets” of communities throughout America.

There are, no doubt, scores of government programs that need to be replaced or reformed. But the Ex-Im Bank isn’t one of them. Rather, the Ex-Im Bank is an efficient and prudent institution that drives exports and economic growth and supports good American jobs, all while actually making a $2 billion profit for the U.S. Treasury over the past five years. If that’s not a model for good governance, what is?

Main Street America is already increasingly frustrated with Washington. Let’s not fuel the fire by eliminating worthwhile programs that directly address Main Street’s real needs.

This piece was originally published in Republic 3.0.