Paul Tonko: “Thank you very much, Representative Kaptur. Thank you for leading us in this discussion. We are going to be joined in a…”

“Thank you very much, Representative Kaptur. Thank you for leading us in this discussion. We are going to be joined in a minute with our representative from Rochester, New York, Representative Louise Slaughter, and she and I, we can suggest, live along the Erie Canal Corridor, she at the western end of upstate New York, I at the eastern end. That corridor became the birthplace of a necklace of communities dubbed ``mill towns'' with the development of the Erie Canal. Product activity, product discovery, product development was the theme ongoing in that region. People tethered their American dream in these mill towns. They came, they worked their fingers to the bone, they came up with product ideas, and that was the pulse of our community. Manufacturing was alive and well. Then we saw this onslaught of what was called a trade negotiations process, where we would get into this concept of providing for negotiations, but those negotiations have grown a far distance from trade barriers and negotiations on tariffs. It became a way to encourage public policy in a very veiled kind of concept, so that you were addressing far beyond the tariff measures and the trade burdens. What we have today, as you indicated, is trillions of dollars in trade deficit where these manufacturing jobs have left our home communities in upstate New York and are now, in many situations, in underdeveloped nations or newly developing nations.…”