Political Quotes

“Reclaiming my time, during the NAFTA debate in 1993, we stood in this hall, the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Strickland) and I, for much of the summer doing discussions like this and into the fall and into November. And when the vote was held, one of the things the other side always said was NAFTA will create jobs. It will be an economic stimulus, if you will. It will right our trade imbalance. Our trade imbalance in 1994 when NAFTA took effect in January of that year was $182 billion. That meant that we imported $182 billion more worth of goods than we exported. The NAFTA promoters and the free traders and the hot-shot Harvard economists and the President and the former secretaries of state and the newspaper editors, CEOs, all said this will get fixed. Do my colleagues know what the trade deficit that was just announced is? $439 billion. That is billion with a B, and that is a $250 billion growth in trade deficit. What that means, according to President Bush, Sr., Papa Bush, he said, every billion dollars of trade, either deficit or surplus, represented between 19,000 and 20,000 jobs. So if you have a billion dollar trade deficit, that means you lost 20,000 jobs to overseas. If you have a billion dollar trade surplus, then you gained 19, 20,000 jobs. Well, a $250 billion trade deficit, it went from $250 billion worse than it was, means 5 million jobs. Those are generally industrial jobs. They are well-paying jobs. They are jobs that pay benefits.”