Democratic House Candidate Mac Schneider Takes Swipe at Big Banking, Accidentally Hits Senator Heitkamp

Democratic House candidate Mac Schneider took a swipe at Big Banking, and the Trump tax cuts, with this tweet this morning:

Schneider is being a bit myopic. These benefits to banks are hardly the only feature of the Trump tax cuts. Schneider should know that this election season he will be campaigning to an electorate which has benefited the most from the tax cuts. According to the the Tax Policy Center – a group backed by the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution – North Dakota tax filers will see an average 10.8 percent – or $2,170 – cut. That’s the most in the nation.

If Mac wants to win in November he and his fellow Democrats need to spend a little less time grousing to one another in their left wing social media bubbles and start engaging with actual North Dakotans.

But the implications of Schneider’s tweet don’t end there. He casts Big Banking as a sort of villain in his tweet, one benefiting from Trump/Republican largess, but perhaps he’s forgetting that the candidate on the top of his state party’s ticket this cycle is probably the best friend Big Banking has in the Senate right now.

“Big banks love funding Heidi Heitkamp, and she loves subsidizing big banks,” writes Timothy Carney for the Washington Examiner this morning:

No senator gets more money from banks than does Heidi Heitkamp, D-N.D., and no senator fights harder for taxpayer subsidies for banks than does Heidi Heitkamp.

With the numbers now public from the first quarter of 2018, Heitkamp is the league leader in campaign cash from commercial banks according to the Center for Responsive Politics. That’s not surprising, considering she’s a vulnerable Democrat who sits on the Banking Committee. It also helps explain the ferocity with which she defends the Export-Import Bank, a federal agency that subsidizes U.S. exports by giving taxpayer-backed guarantees to big banks when they finance foreign buyers of U.S. goods.

Heitkamp’s top source of campaign cash is Goldman Sachs, and she is the No. 1 senator at getting Goldman cash. Ex-Im has regularly subsidized Goldman, and Goldman has lobbied on Ex-Im. When Goldman lends money to Norweigian Air, for instance, Ex-Im guarantees the loan in order to subsidize the airline’s Boeing purchase. Once Boeing was the subsidized exporter (back when Goldman owned Hawker Beechcraft and Ex-Im subsidized Hawker’s sale of corporate jets to a state-owned Chinese Bank).

“Call me crazy, but this isn’t the best way to help working families,” writes Schneider, talking about public policy beneficial to the banking industry.

Meanwhile, Senator Heidi Heitkamp has received more re-election dollars from Big Banking than any other member of the U.S. Senate.

Schneider was Heitkamp’s hand-picked candidate to run for House, too, which makes this gaffe all the more funny.