[Congressional Record Volume 151, Number 43 (Wednesday, April 13, 2005)]
[House]
[Pages H1943-H1944]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                     RECORD TRADE DEFICITS CONTINUE

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Dent). Under a previous order of the 
House, the gentleman from Oregon (Mr. DeFazio) is recognized for 5 
minutes.
  Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, well, congratulations to the Bush-Cheney 
administration. They set another record yesterday, but it is one I am 
certain they will soon eclipse. The United States of America ran the 
largest 1-month trade deficit in our history, $61 billion. Tens of 
thousands of jobs were lost in order to achieve that record. Whole 
industries were exported to China and other cheap wage countries in 
order to set that record.
  Congratulations to the administration. Their trade policy is a 
tremendous success for those few multinational corporations who are 
profiting hand-over-fist with these policies, while tens of thousands 
of Americans lose their job and we lose our industrial base here at 
home.
  In the first 2 months of the year, a $29 billion trade deficit with 
Communist China. We are on a par, the Bush administration is on a path, 
to beat their record trade deficit with

[[Page H1944]]

Communist China that they set just last year, a $162 billion trade 
deficit with Communist China last year; a country which pirates 
products from small businesses across America, including a number in my 
district, both hi-tech, furniture and others; a country that does not 
observe international laws; a country that the Bush-Cheney 
administration told us, ``Oh, please, give us permanent most-favored-
nation status for those Chinese, and then they will clean up their act. 
Put them in the World Trade Organization and we will use the force of 
law against them.''
  Well, they have only chosen to file one complaints against the tens 
of billions of dollars of products pirated by the Chinese from American 
firms, and that was for one of the drug companies, of course. Who else 
would they go to bat for? Not the small businesses, not the hi-tech 
business in my district, not the furniture business in my district, not 
the other businesses across America. Yet their trade policy is working 
just great.
  Now they say two things. Well, if the dollar just drops a little bit, 
everything will be fine. Well, the dollar has dropped a lot, and 
everything is not fine, and the dollar is on the verge of dropping one 
whole heck of a lot more. Even when it gets down to the value of an 
Indian rupee, it still is not going to solve the trade problem. Because 
the classic economic theory is, well, if your currency is devalued, 
then your manufacturers will crank things up and your goods will be 
bought overseas. That will not happen for two reasons:
  One, we do not make things anymore, and many of our companies have 
moved their industrial base to China and many more are contemplating 
doing that or being forced to do that, or to Mexico or to other 
countries where they can exploit labor better. So, for that reason, it 
is not going to happen.
  Second, because the Chinese will not allow our goods in, and they 
have illegally pegged their currency to ours, so their currency is 
artificially cheap. It falls with the dollar, so we can never catch up 
with the Chinese. And the Bush administration has refused to do 
anything about those illegal actions by the Chinese, the illegal 
pirating of U.S. goods, theft of jobs, illegal currency manipulations 
by the Chinese.
  The Bush administration will not do anything because a few big 
companies and contributors are doing very well over there. It is just 
to the detriment of the majority of the workers and people here at home 
in the United States of America.
  They say there is another reason why the trade deficit is so big, 
because our economy is growing so fast, faster than other economies. 
That is why we got a big trade deficit.
  Well, that is an interesting argument. So we are borrowing a bunch of 
money from the Chinese, they are now our second largest international 
creditor, soon to be our largest, the Japanese are number one, and we 
use that money which we borrow from them to buy goods that used to be 
produced in the United States of America. And since those are produced 
nominally by American corporations, that shows growth here at home.
  In the meantime, here at home people are unemployed, running up their 
credit cards, they have lost their jobs to unfair Chinese competition, 
and that shows what a robust and growing economy we have.
  What a disaster this is for the working people of this country. What 
a disaster this is for the future industrial might of the United States 
of America, for our productive capacity. What a disaster it is going to 
be when the dollar tanks and oil goes up even more because the dollar 
will have been devalued so much.
  There are so many things wrong with this laissez faire trade policy 
it is hard to know where to start, but the Bush administration thinks 
it is working just fine because they set a new record yesterday, the 
largest 1-month trade deficit in the history of the United States of 
America, and they are hoping they beat it every month this year and 
beat last year's record trade deficit, because that means jobs are 
exported, and, in the words of the President's former economic adviser, 
that is a good thing when we export jobs. It makes the country more 
efficient.

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