Wendy Sherman: “I want to thank the Speaker for recognizing me and indicating that I can speak for an hour. We get caught up in so many…”

“I want to thank the Speaker for recognizing me and indicating that I can speak for an hour. We get caught up in so many issues here that we sometimes don't explore them in depth, and with 1 hour, I plan to look in depth first at the President's trade policy toward China, and then toward the Republican tax bill. The President is meeting again with President Xi from China. They will put out a beautiful joint statement, they will pose for photographs, and there will even be a business deal or two to announce. These are the two largest economies in the world. They involve tens of trillions of dollars. So every month, a few big things happen that are bad, and one or two big things happen that are good. There is always a particular business deal that you can package and wrap as a photo op. But the fact is that we have to look at the overall trading relationship. The trading relationship is this: we run hundreds of billions of dollars of trade deficit, and every billion dollars of trade deficit cost us 10,000 jobs. So let's look at what has happened while President Trump has been in office. We look each month at our trade and goods with the People's Republic of China, and we start with a deficit of just a bit over $22 billion, and for the most recent statistics available, August of this year, we are up to almost $35 billion. What is interesting about this chart is that every month Trump has been in office, our trade deficit with China has grown.…”