On the recordOctober 12, 2011
I thank the gentleman. I'm from northern Ohio. Just to clarify what this means for one of America's lodestar industries, here's a little graph that shows how many Korean cars are coming into the United States today, over half a million. This little dot here represents what the U.S. is selling into the Korean market right now: 7,450 of our cars in that market versus over half a million of their cars sold here. This agreement basically says maybe America could sell 75,000 cars--but there's no guarantee, no guarantee--and if you go to Korea today, you see less than 5 percent of the cars on their streets are from anywhere else in the world. So, you think they're going to be reciprocal? Theirs is a closed market. When is America going to stand up in its trade policies to state-managed capitalism in these other countries and give our workers and our companies an even break? All this deal says is we might sell--it doesn't say must sell--it says we might sell up to 75,000 cars in that economy, but they're already eating our lunch. The Economic Policy Institute estimates this agreement will cost us another 159,000 net jobs. And you know, Mr. Speaker, I sure hope they don't come out of Ohio again. I hope they come out of the districts of every single person here who's going to vote for this agreement and cause more job hemorrhaging to this economy.
