This is just great, guys. Thanks for looking out for our money.

Your Taxpayers Dollars At Work: Ex-Im Officials Blow through Their Travel Budget by $3 Million Flying First Class

Who cares about living within one’s budget limits and being good stewards of taxpayers’ dollars? Not Ex-Im Bank officials, apparently. According to information acquired by the House Financial Services Committee and reported by the Hill last week, Ex-Im Bank officials exceeded the agency’s travel budget by $3 million over the last three years…

Originally, everyone assumed that the reason for this excess spending had to do with all the addition traveling the agency officials had to do to go sell their services around the country. But that’s not entirely true: Officials also often splurged on first class tickets rather than travel like most of us in economy class.

You know, it’s an odd fact of American politics that it sometimes takes the most trivial seeming hook in a story to finally get the public’s attention. There are many, many good reasons to oppose the renewal of the Ex-Im bank’s charter, and pretty much every author here at Hot Air has written about them. But the issue still fails to gain a lot of traction in the national discourse, and there’s a good reason for that. Let’s face the facts here… talking about the Export Import bank is about as sexy and appealing as watching paint dry. Most Americans are busy watching Sports Center and just aren’t going to spend an evening digesting all the material involved in this issue.

But when you happen upon a story where Ex-Im officials are flying first class on the taxpayer dime, now you’ve got something. Fights are breaking out on flights over knee space. Everyone who travels, either on business or for personal reasons, has seen the shrinking seats and rising fees. Nobody is flying first class unless they are very high up the food chain on company business travel or extremely comfortably well off. (And there’s not many of us in the latter category under the current economy.)

Blowing taxpayer money on first class seats is the type of thing which catches voters with a sucker punch to the gut. Maybe this story will finally get their attention.