Political Quotes

“We do. The Senator from Oregon and I have talked about this, that there is a gentleman who worked for a paper company who illustrated to me what China has done. It was a specific kind of paper, a glossy, coated paper for magazines. The Chinese bought their wood pulp in Brazil, they shipped it to China, milled it there, and sold it back to the United States, and they undercut Blue Heron and Ohio paper companies because they had that 25-percent subsidy. There is no way, when labor costs are only about--labor is only about 10 percent of the cost of paper production--there is no way they could possibly buy something as heavy and voluminous as wood pulp, ship it across the ocean, mill it, ship it back in the form of paper, and not-- the only way they can undercut prices is by huge subsidies. There may have been other subsidies to it. It may have been water and energy and capital and land, but it surely was that 25-percent subsidy these companies have when they undercut our manufacturers. I just know that in 15 years, I say to the Senator, or 10 years, we will look back on the history of our country and say: Why did we let one country undercut our manufacturing base so substantially and lose all those jobs and lose all that technology?…”