Wendy Sherman: “Now that we give guaranteed permanent entry to the U.S. market, multibillion dollar factories, the kind that make the…”

“Now that we give guaranteed permanent entry to the U.S. market, multibillion dollar factories, the kind that make the high-tech products that we are still as of today competitive in, those can go to China as well and pay 15 and 20 cents an hour. So it used to be that I was only worried about the capital flight, that a billion dollar low-tech factory would be built in China when that same money might be available here to build a different kind of factory that could employ American workers and perhaps even making a different product. Especially our Republican colleagues are always talking about how we need more capital, how we have to encourage savings. Well, we could pass the biggest tax bill designed to increase savings and if it leads to another $30 billion in savings, all of which are corporations borrowing and investing in China, then we are exporting capital for the purpose of exporting jobs, and we can imagine what effect that has on wages. We have enough jobs in America, but we need a situation where there is the labor shortage that causes those jobs to be paying a living wage.”