The pro-Ex-Im lobby never sleeps. As soon as Senator Lee and Representative Flores’s op-ed against the bank came out this morning, e-mails by paid Ex-Im lobbyists attacking them were sent to every offices in Congress repeating the usual scare tactics. One e-mail:

Though jobs are on the line across the country, Rep. Bill Flores and Sen. Mike Lee published an op-ed today calling for Congress to let the Ex-Im Bank expire.
They ignore the fact that Ex-Im supports 153,000 jobs in Texas and 2,000 jobs in Utah. They’re ignore the fact that U.S. job creators will lose business and jobs if Ex-Im closes–1,800 with just one deal.

First, can we please stop claiming that jobs will disappear if Ex-Im isn’t reauthorized? That’s not how it works. It’s also not clear where these jobs numbers come from, anyway: Ex-Im Bank has removed its state-by-state and district-by-district job claims from its website, likely because it knows how sketchy these numbers are. But let’s assume these numbers are based on something and are arguably meaningful. Let’s put them in perspective.

Start with Utah: The email claims that Ex-Im ”supports” 2,000 jobs in the state. Present tense, but note the absence of a year or time period for this claim. Based on previous e-mails from the same source, we know that these 2,000 jobs are actually spread over the years from 2007 to 2015. In a given year, that’s 223 jobs supported. According to the International Trade Administration (ITA), in 2014, 50,578 U.S. jobs were supported by Utah exports. So, roughly speaking, maybe something like 0.4 percent of all jobs Utah export jobs were backed by Ex-Im. 99.6 percent of them had nothing to do with Ex-Im.

According to ITA, in 2013, 3,494 companies exported from Utah. According to the Ex-Im website, in 2013, just 17 exporters — again, 0.4 percent of exporters – had Ex-Im backing.

According to the Census Bureau, in 2014, the value of total Utah exports was $12.3 billion. Ex-Im claims to have backed $13 million in exports from Utah — 0.1 percent of the state total

Now, Texas:

The e-mail claims that 153,000 jobs were supported by Ex-Im, presumably, again, between 2007 and 2015. That’s 17,000 jobs a year. Well, according to ITA, in 2014 1,117,318 jobs were supported by exports from Texas. That suggests that in 2014, 1.5 percent of Texas export jobs were backed by Ex-Im.

In a previous post, I also noted that in 2013, Ex-Im says it supported 382 exporters from Texas, out of the 41,558 companies exported from the state that year. So most of them — well, 99.9 percent, in fact — exported without Ex-Im help​. The share is likely to be slightly higher in 2014, because Ex-Im said it benefited 555 exporters that year, but that would still be fewer than 1 percent of exporters in the whole state.

In 2014, ExIm supported $3 billion in export value, while Texas businesses exported $289 billion worth of goods and services. That means, in 2014, ExIm backed only 1 percent of Texas exports. Ninety-nine percent of Texas exports happened without Ex-Im subsidies.

So let’s see Ex-Im for what it is: an agency that artificially boosts the bottom line of a ridiculously small numbers of companies in Utah and Texas, while a vast majority of companies in these states are competing without any help from the government. That’s unfair and, ultimately, destructive to free markets.