William Tauzin: “If it is produced in England and shipped to America, the value-added taxes that would be imposed in England are…”

“If it is produced in England and shipped to America, the value-added taxes that would be imposed in England are exempted. They are actually rebated back to the producer, and that box of cereal enters America without the value-added tax on it, and it sits on the shelf right next to the box of cereal that was produced in America with all of those income taxes on it. So one has a 14- to 15-percent disadvantage. Which one is it? The American product. The same thing is true when we send that box of cereal to England. It carries that 14 and 15 percent IRS tax on its back, and it gets the English value-added tax on it, and it sits on the shelf next to the English product that only has a value-added tax. Guess who suffers a disadvantage? The American product again. So when Pat Buchanan was running around complaining about how free trade was damaging American workers and sending jobs overseas, he was right, but the real culprit is not the GATT Treaty, the real culprit is our tax laws which penalize every worker in this country, every American product, whether it is sold domestically or in foreign lands.”