JOHN LINDER: “We have the lowest tariffs in the world. We have thousands of Georgia companies selling goods and services into a global…”

“We have the lowest tariffs in the world. We have thousands of Georgia companies selling goods and services into a global economy. We want to lower the tariffs of other nations so that we can be competitive. Our ability for the President to negotiate with other nations and lower their tariffs will only improve our sales. It will only help us. More than half of the Georgia companies that sell goods and services into the global economy are small and medium-sized businesses. That is our growth rate. Twenty-five percent of our economic growth over the last 10 years has been due to export. We simply cannot throw up a wall around us. Chris Patten said when we were talking about NAFTA in 1993, I believe it was, Chris Patten was the last British Governor of Hong Kong, and he gave a speech in which he said if a space ship had come to the Planet Earth in the 16th century, the 15th and 16th centuries, and landed in the teepee huts of North America, to the typhoid-ridden streets of London and the warring streets of Paris, and wound up in the Ming Dynasty, they would have concluded within a minisecond that China would rule the world for centuries. She had just invented gunpowder and a printing press and had a huge cultural growth rate; the people were happy and well fed and economic growth rates were rapidly climbing. And then he said this: and then she built a wall around herself, and history told a different tale.”