[Congressional Record Volume 157, Number 38 (Monday, March 14, 2011)]
[Senate]
[Pages S1593-S1594]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                             EXPORT POLICY

  Mr. BROWN of Ohio. Earlier today in Columbus, OH, the State capital 
of my great State, I was at the Ohio State University's Fisher College 
of Business. We talked by phone with Under Secretary of Commerce 
Francisco Sanchez, who is one of the leaders at the Department of 
Commerce, on how to grow exports in this country.
  The President has charged the Congress, our businesses, encouraged 
all of us to find ways to double exports as a major path to economic 
growth, especially to grow manufacturing in our country. We know that 
for the last several months, we have seen manufacturing growth, albeit 
too small, but manufacturing growth in this country.
  That is especially important in Ohio. My State is the third leading 
manufacturing State in the country, behind only California and Texas, 
States which are two and three times our size in population. Yet Ohio 
has kept pace with doing relatively well in manufacturing. But we know 
what has happened to manufacturing in our country in the last 30 years.
  Only 30 years ago, manufacturing was more than one-quarter of our 
GDP, financial services was about 10 or 11 percent of GDP. In these 30 
years that position has almost flipped. Financial services is over one-
quarter of our GDP, manufacturing is only 10, 11, or 12 percent. That 
is why the President and his push on exporting is so important, not 
that we only export manufacturing goods, of course, we export services, 
as we should. But clearly manufacturing is a major component of that.
  I sit on the President's Export Advisory Council with leaders of the 
administration and the CEOs of some of America's largest companies and 
many successful mid-sized and small companies in this country. We had a 
meeting last Friday with Secretary Locke, Under Secretary Sanchez, 
Secretary of State Clinton, Jim McNerney of Boeing, Ursula Burns of 
Xerox, Alan Mullaly of Ford, as part of the President's export council.

[[Page S1594]]

  In Ohio, as a result, I have put together an export advisory council. 
We met today in Columbus. That is what our meeting was about, to talk 
about ideas. We heard from Albert Green of Kent Displays, William 
Dawson of NexTech Materials, Philip Irwin of Ametek Solidstate 
Controls, Randall Willaman of Command Ilkon, Inc., Mark Friedman of 
National Biological Corporation, Arlinda Vaughan from Volk Optical, and 
Ken Hagen from Fosbel.
  All of them raised concerns directly to the Under Secretary of 
Commerce and directly to me, concerns about corruption in Russia, 
concerns about tariffs in Brazil, concerns we all face and all of our 
companies face in breaking into the Chinese market, and many other 
concerns about everything from medical devices to export of services 
and all of that. So the meeting was important.
  I will mention one other. Susan Helper, the head of the Economics 
Department at Case Western, had particularly good thoughts about how we 
grow manufacturing in this country. We know those jobs are created by 
medium and small businesses. We also know that fewer than 1 percent of 
American companies actually export. Even as close as we are to Canada 
or to Mexico, only 1 percent of our businesses export. So we know we 
have to do much more.
  In Germany, for instance, 20 percent of their workforce is in 
manufacturing. They have a trade surplus with the rest of the world, 
while we have a huge almost insidious trade deficit. Germany has done 
some pretty interesting things in encouraging manufacturing.
  As many people point out, we have not had in our country a 
manufacturing policy. I spoke with Pat Russo tonight, who is the former 
CEO of Lucent Technologies and a couple of--she sits on the General 
Motors board and a couple of other people from the GM board I spoke to, 
and talked about the fact that we do not have a manufacturing policy in 
this country. That is why we are seeing other countries begin to do 
much better in manufacturing, while we have, by and large, drifted in 
our policies and our strategies on manufacturing.
  There are several things that came out of this meeting that we need 
to do. We need to pay particular attention on economic development 
assistance and creating economic development partnerships and business 
incubators.
  We need to pay special attention to help those companies get access 
to capital. That has been a vital roadblock--as the Presiding Officer 
from Oregon has been involved--a roadblock to our full economic 
recovery. We need to look at our R&D tax credits.
  Part of a national manufacturing policy should be increases in R&D 
tax credits, including making 48(C) a part of the Code that encourages 
conservation, encourages more efficiencies in energy production and in 
energy use, making 48(C) permanent.
  It means workforce training--our Sectors Act, which matches up what 
local businesses and labor unions and community colleges and workforce 
investment boards do to retrain workers so they find jobs after that 
training. That is why we are doing at end of the month our fourth 
annual Ohio College Presidents Conference, where I invite in some 55, 
60 college presidents. We have done it for the last 3 years, since my 
second year in the Senate, to talk about these issues: How do we 
encourage people to become engineers? How do we help with access to 
college, particularly in light of the fact that Republicans are trying 
to cut Pell grants several hundred dollars per student, sometimes a 
couple of thousand, $3,000 a family, whatever.
  How do we fight back and make sure that students have access to 
education and to our higher education system, those who choose to go to 
college? We have a lot of work to do. All of this includes, as I said 
at the White House the other day in the meeting of the President's 
Export Council, while we work on exports, we need to fix our trade 
agreements, we need to fix our tax policy, we need to make sure those 
workers who lose their jobs because of trade--and this is so often 
forgotten about by my Republican colleagues--workers who lose their 
jobs because of trade have to be compensated. They need to be 
retrained. They need to keep their health care. That is why the 
Presiding Officer and I and many others have to fight for the 
extension--Senator Casey especially from Pennsylvania--of trade 
adjustment assistance and the health coverage tax credit, two long-time 
Federal programs. The TAA, Trade Adjustment Assistance, was started 
bipartisanly under President Kennedy in 1962.
  Those are so important for workers who have lost jobs through no 
doing of their own but because of trade agreements passed wrongfully, 
wrongheadedly in this body and in the House. Because of trade 
agreements they have lost their jobs. We need those workers to have the 
opportunity to be retrained and to continue to keep their health 
insurance after they have been laid off through no fault of their own.
  Our efforts to double exports is extraordinarily important for 
economic growth. At the same time it is important that we are sensitive 
to those workers who have lost their jobs because of trade policy. We 
can do this right. We can enforce our trade laws more aggressively as 
President Obama has begun to do. We can work on trade agreements. We 
can fix trade policy so it actually helps American workers and American 
consumers. Instead of practicing trade policy adopted out of a textbook 
that is 20 years out of print, we ought to be adopting a trade policy 
that is in our Nation's national interest. As we move with President 
Obama and this Congress toward a manufacturing strategy and, even 
better, a manufacturing policy such as most of the rest of the 
industrialized world has, we will all be in a better position to build 
a middle class in Oregon and Ohio and across the country.
  I yield the floor.

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