Skip to main content

Business Rallies for Carolina Jobs & Ex-Im Bank

Ted Jones
The following is a guest post by Ted Jones, Director of International Supplier Relations for NEI.

For several months now, we've been shining a spotlight on the dispute in Washington over the reauthorization of the U.S. Export-Import Bank. But this week, the focus of this battle is moving outside the Beltway far away from Washington-based Tea Party groups to where real jobs are at stake - in this case on Wednesday morning in Charlotte where businesses from across the Carolinas are going to rally to support the bank and the work it does promoting exports in the region.

The event will take place at the Westin Charlotte Hotel beginning at 8:30 a.m. and will include businesses from all over the Carolinas. Already confirmed to be in attendance and participating are companies like Duke Energy, Holtec, CB&I, Fluor, Curtiss-Wright, GE Aviation and Boeing. We also expect a number of smaller nuclear energy suppliers - companies who would be forced to start laying off employees immediately without the help of the bank - to be in attendance to tell their stories.

The commercial nuclear energy industry is vitally important to the Carolinas. A study by Clemson University found that 29,000 jobs are generated by the nuclear industry in the two states. These jobs account for $4.2 billion in direct and indirect pay along with $1 billion in state and local taxes in the Carolinas. Without the Ex-Im Bank, a significant portion of that economic activity would be immediately jeopardized.

With North Carolina’s high commercial stake in global markets, a failure to renew Ex-Im Bank would be devastating to businesses and families in the state. For fiscal 2014, the bank approved transactions for hundreds of North Carolina exporters, supporting thousands of jobs. Contrary to the claims of Ex-Im Bank’s opponents, four out of every five transactions that Ex-Im Bank supports are for small or medium-sized exporters.

We'll be following the events in Charlotte on Wednesday morning via our Twitter feed. In the meantime, please take a look back in our archives at some of the previous articles we've written in support of Ex-Im Bank and the jobs that come with it.
Also, be sure to refer back to NEI.org and our landing page on Ex-Im Bank reauthorization.

Comments

The Tea Party does not want tax payer funding of foreign govts and corporations via the Export Import Bank or any other means. I am pro-nuclear and I agree with the Tea Party. Stop the socialism! Stop the liberal leftism!

Popular posts from this blog

An Ohio School Board Is Working to Save Nuclear Plants

Ohio faces a decision soon about its two nuclear reactors, Davis-Besse and Perry, and on Wednesday, neighbors of one of those plants issued a cry for help. The reactors’ problem is that the price of electricity they sell on the high-voltage grid is depressed, mostly because of a surplus of natural gas. And the reactors do not get any revenue for the other benefits they provide. Some of those benefits are regional – emissions-free electricity, reliability with months of fuel on-site, and diversity in case of problems or price spikes with gas or coal, state and federal payroll taxes, and national economic stimulus as the plants buy fuel, supplies and services. Some of the benefits are highly localized, including employment and property taxes. One locality is already feeling the pinch: Oak Harbor on Lake Erie, home to Davis-Besse. The town has a middle school in a building that is 106 years old, and an elementary school from the 1950s, and on May 2 was scheduled to have a referendu

Why Ex-Im Bank Board Nominations Will Turn the Page on a Dysfunctional Chapter in Washington

In our present era of political discord, could Washington agree to support an agency that creates thousands of American jobs by enabling U.S. companies of all sizes to compete in foreign markets? What if that agency generated nearly billions of dollars more in revenue than the cost of its operations and returned that money – $7 billion over the past two decades – to U.S. taxpayers? In fact, that agency, the Export-Import Bank of the United States (Ex-Im Bank), was reauthorized by a large majority of Congress in 2015. To be sure, the matter was not without controversy. A bipartisan House coalition resorted to a rarely-used parliamentary maneuver in order to force a vote. But when Congress voted, Ex-Im Bank won a supermajority in the House and a large majority in the Senate. For almost two years, however, Ex-Im Bank has been unable to function fully because a single Senate committee chairman prevented the confirmation of nominees to its Board of Directors. Without a quorum

NEI Praises Connecticut Action in Support of Nuclear Energy

Earlier this week, Connecticut Gov. Dannel P. Malloy signed SB-1501 into law, legislation that puts nuclear energy on an equal footing with other non-emitting sources of energy in the state’s electricity marketplace. “Gov. Malloy and the state legislature deserve praise for their decision to support Dominion’s Millstone Power Station and the 1,500 Connecticut residents who work there," said NEI President and CEO Maria Korsnick. "By opening the door to Millstone having equal access to auctions open to other non-emitting sources of electricity, the state will help preserve $1.5 billion in economic activity, grid resiliency and reliability, and clean air that all residents of the state can enjoy," Korsnick said. Millstone Power Station Korsnick continued, "Connecticut is the third state to re-balance its electricity marketplace, joining New York and Illinois, which took their own legislative paths to preserving nuclear power plants in 2016. Now attention should