Jack Reed: “Again, the Senator is absolutely correct. Frankly, to move to an analogy which is a little more colloquial but perhaps…”

“Again, the Senator is absolutely correct. Frankly, to move to an analogy which is a little more colloquial but perhaps just as compelling, if we were managing a professional baseball team and we lost every year for 10 or 15 years, I don't think we would be managing that baseball team. That is essentially, if you charge us as managers of our international trade policy, we have lost every year for the last several decades. The trade policy has to be changed. Frankly, I don't believe anyone here is advocating that we could not use a good fast-track procedure. The argument is this is not a good fast-track procedure; that we are neglecting several of the most critical items when it comes to realistic competition between countries in the world today for international trade. We are totally neglecting the differential between our wage structure, particularly our manufacturing wage structure, and the wage structures overseas. We are neglecting it by simply saying that is not important to us, we don't care if workers in Third World countries are making 2 or 3 cents an hour or 20 cents an hour, when our workers are making $6 or $7 an hour or more. We don't care about that. We should care about that because, frankly, that is one of the reasons why we have a huge trade deficit, particularly in manufactured goods. Because there are incentives now, huge incentives, to deploy capital from the United States into these countries so that they can set up manufacturing plants.…”