On the recordMarch 17, 2015
Thank you very much, Congressman Tonko. Thank you for your leadership and bringing us to the floor. As Congresswoman DeLauro completes her remarks, I just want to thank her for leading all of us in this great quest to move toward trade agreements that create jobs in our country and trade balances rather than trade deficits. I thought that if I could contribute anything to the conversation when this administration or any administration says, Well, what do you want, I can tell you what we don't want. We don't want agreements like this. This was the agreement with Korea where they said that the United States would be getting the ability to ship all these cars over to Korea. What actually happened was the reverse. We get a trickle in there; they get a deluge in here. Our trade deficit with Korea has gone up 84 percent since the agreement was signed. We say to the administration: Give us a trade agreement that gives America not just a trade balance, which would mean we wouldn't lose any jobs, but a trade surplus, not a trade deficit, which costs us 5,000 jobs for every billion dollars of trade deficit. We want balanced agreements; we want agreements in surplus, not in deficit. Every American knows what I am talking about. They have experienced it in their own communities.…
