America's Credit Unions' Jim Nussle Arms GAC Attendees with Key Stats for Hiking the Hill...

Jim and Karen Nussle (courtesy of America's Credit Unions)

 By Lisa Freeman, Contributing Editor

After turning the main conference stage into a disco and doing The Hustle with his wife, Karen, America’s Credit Unions CEO Jim Nussle may well have summed up this year’s Governmental Affairs Conference with this quip: “Washington, D.C., where the D.C. now stands for disruption and chaos.”

As the credit union faithful descend on Capitol Hill for the 50th year of the Big GAC Attack, Nussle exhorted industry leaders to use some key numbers to paint a picture for members of Congress.

One such number: 18,000. That’s the number of branches banks have closed in the last 10 years -- while credit unions have gone into those very same locations and opened 600 branches, helping to prevent them from becoming “banking deserts.”

A few other crucial numbers from a recent ACU report: 266 billion, 822,000 and 33 billion. That’s what credit unions will be contributing over the next 10 years -- $266 billion to the GDP, 822,000 jobs and $33 billion in income tax revenue.

These are just among some of the numbers that will help credit unions tell their stories when they Hike the Hill later this week, Nussle said, and there’s an urgency to the political pilgrimage this year, as the Trump administration has put a giant microscope on cost-cutting, doing more with less and taking a long, hard look at how to pay for the Trump tax cuts that are set to expire.

While veteran lawmakers are well aware of who credit unions are, whether by virtue of PAC dollars or political outreach efforts, Nussle noted that approximately 50% of this Congress is new since the last tax cuts, meaning there’s a lot of education that needs to happen.

Whether it’s the belief that credit unions are “just like banks” or that “they only serve the poor,” there are a lot of misconceptions out there about the CU industry, whom Nussle dubbed the Financial First Responders -- the first to help those in crisis, whether from natural disasters like the hurricanes in the Southeast and the wildfires in the West, or just helping someone get past living paycheck to paycheck and buying that first car or that first home.

Nussle predicted that when credit union leaders lobby their lawmakers this week, they are going to hear a a lot of members of Congress tell them not to worry, that the credit union tax exemption isn’t really on the table, that it’s not going to happen. The problem, he said, is that it’s not going to happen as a straight up-and-down vote on the credit union tax exemption in a bill of it’s very own. That’s not where the real danger is.

“It’s a meeting that happens at 2 in the morning, when leaders realize they can’t figure out how to pay for something, or where they’re going to get the votes to pass something. I know this because I’ve called these meetings,” Nussle said, recalling his days as a member of Congress. It’s at those 2 a.m. meetings, he said, where the big question finally becomes, “Who can we afford to piss off?”

And that’s when credit unions need to be sure that lawmakers remember what may be the most important number of all: 140 million. That’s the number of people who belong to credit unions. Banks would call them customers, but credit unions call them members -- and that terminology is different for a reason. But lawmakers call them something else: voters. And also tax payers.

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