Jeff Duncan: “Yesterday in my hometown of Knoxville, Tennessee, the Levi Strauss Company announced that a plant was closing and 900…”

“Yesterday in my hometown of Knoxville, Tennessee, the Levi Strauss Company announced that a plant was closing and 900 jobs would be moved out of this country. This follows on the heels over the past year of many other plants closing in east Tennessee and throughout this Nation. We have entered into some trade deals over the past several years that have not been good for American companies and American workers. They may have been good for big multinational companies, but they have resulted in millions of jobs going to other countries. I think that many, many people, in fact I think a great majority of the people in this Nation, are sick and tired of all of these jobs going to other nations. Our trade deficits have been running at almost unbelievable levels over the last couple of years, usually $25 billion to $30 billion a month, or even higher. Many economists say that we lose 20,000 jobs per billion, but even if the job loss is much smaller than that, it still means that we have been losing millions and millions of jobs over the last several years, and I just do not believe that we can sustain that kind of job loss indefinitely on into the future. In the short run, we do benefit from being able to buy cheaper goods from overseas. In the long run, however, we have lost and continue to lose millions of jobs to other countries. These jobs will not be easy to replace.”