Political Quotes

“I thank my friend from Toledo, the gentlewoman from Ohio (Ms. Kaptur). And the gentlewoman is exactly right. I have a chart just with the Mexico trade deficit. The gentlewoman talked about Canada, the U.S., all of this. And you can see, we went from a trade surplus when NAFTA was signed to this, over $40 billion. And I look at the year that the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Strickland) and I were elected to Congress in 1992. The United States, and I do not want to bore people with numbers, but in 1992, the year we first ran, the United States had a $38 billion trade deficit with the world. That meant we bought $38 billion more than we exported. Last year we had a trade deficit of $620 billion. Every trade agreement, as the gentlewoman from Ohio (Ms. Kaptur) says, they promise the same thing. They say more growth in the United States, more jobs, more manufacturing, more exports to the United States if you pass this trade agreement. Every time Congress passes one, it gets worse. The trade deficit keeps growing. The job loss keeps increasing. The definition of insanity is when you do the same thing over and over and over again and you expect a different outcome. They are asking us to do the same thing. So we can see these same numbers come with Central America by increasing, increasing, increasing, increasing deficits every year. I would yield to my friend, the gentlewoman from Illinois (Ms. Schakowsky).…”