Rob Portman: “I thank Chairman Thomas for yielding me this time, and I thank my colleague on the other side of the aisle, the…”

“I thank Chairman Thomas for yielding me this time, and I thank my colleague on the other side of the aisle, the gentleman from New York (Mr. Rangel), for engaging in this debate because I think he put his finger on what this is all about tonight. What we are talking about is basically responding to the European Union's decision that we cannot continue to provide a subsidy to our exporters. That was the lemons. And then making lemonade out of it by saying, how are we going to help U.S. firms become more competitive, but not by using the FSC/ETI benefit that was found illegal. How are we doing that? In two ways. One the gentleman from New York just talked about: we are helping manufacturers. This is an area of our economy that is under great challenge for two reasons: one, higher productivity. We are using fewer workers to produce just as much and more so we are losing jobs in manufacturing. Second, international competition. In the last 3 years of the Clinton administration, we lost over 300,000 manufacturing jobs. They are starting to come back. This year alone, we have gained over 100,000 manufacturing jobs as the economy is starting to pick up. But that is not good enough. We want to do more. We want to make sure that we have a strong manufacturing base in this country.”