Political Quotes

“Mr. Speaker, please allow me to explain what happens when flawed free trade agreements are implemented and outsource more U.S. jobs. Our Nation has not had balanced trade accounts for over 25 years. In fact, every time we sign one of these so-called free trade agreements, we lose more and more jobs in our country. In its attempt to move forward the George W. Bush-negotiated U.S.-Korea Free Trade Agreement, it appears the Obama negotiators may have forgotten the real costs of so-called free trade. With Korea, it has been more than a dozen years already since the United States held a trade surplus with Korea. We're already in the red. In 1997, America actually held a small trade surplus with Korea of a little over $1 billion. Since then, we've accumulated $161 billion worth of trade debt, and that is in the red. That translates into lost jobs, lost opportunity in our country. Using the Department of Commerce's estimate that each billion dollars of trade deficit costs us 14,000 jobs, our trade deficit already accumulated with Korea has cost us over 2 million American jobs. And everybody knows we're short over 20 million jobs in our country. The proposed new Korea Free Trade Agreement will make our markets more open to Korean industries but does not do enough to open Korean markets to our products. Every time the United States imports more than we export, it leaves us with higher trade deficits and more lost jobs.…”