[Congressional Record Volume 157, Number 148 (Wednesday, October 5, 2011)]
[Senate]
[Pages S6147-S6149]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
JOBS
Mr. ALEXANDER. Madam President, our country has endured a 9-percent
unemployment rate for a longer period of time than at any other time
since
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the Great Depression. Yet, unfortunately, the Democratic leader is
reluctant to address this problem of joblessness in a serious way.
One way to address it would have been to take the three trade
agreements, which were negotiated 4 and 5 years ago--one with Colombia,
one with South Korea, one with Panama--and send them up to the Senate
and House and let us ratify them and let us move ahead to avoid losing
350,000 jobs--that is an estimate of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce--or
create as many as a quarter of a million jobs--that is the estimate of
the White House. Yet those three trade agreements had been sitting on
the President's desk since the day he took office nearly 3 years ago.
They arrived yesterday--or Monday, I suppose it was--and they are here
waiting for us to act on them.
Every day we do not act on them delays the day when we avoid losing
350,000 jobs or create 250,000 jobs. That has been the case every day
for the last nearly 1,000 days. That would be a good way to address the
jobs issue, but we have not. Instead, we had the President going around
the country during the summer blaming Republicans for not acting on the
three trade agreements when, in fact, the President had not sent them
to us. There is no way the Congress can act on them until the President
forwards them, which he now has. And if he has, why are we not debating
them today? That would be a good way to deal with the jobs issue.
Here is another example. On September 8, the President came before
the Congress and proposed his jobs bill. He said, if I counted
correctly, and I was sitting respectfully in the second row, almost in
the front row--I think he said as many as 17 times: Pass this jobs bill
now. And if that were not enough, he has said it almost every day since
then. The Republican leader mentioned it a few times. He was in Dallas
yesterday. Pass this jobs bill now; I am ready to enact it, said the
President of the United States. Well, it has been sitting there on the
Democratic leader's desk for the last couple of weeks, ever since the
President sent it up here. He spoke about it on September 8.
The person in this body whose job it is to set the agenda is the
Democratic leader, a member of the President's own Democratic Party.
Why doesn't he bring it up? So yesterday the Republican leader said: I
will show courtesy to the President. I will ask the Senate to do what
the President has asked that we do, which is pass this jobs bill now,
and the Democratic leader objected.
So here for the second time we have the President running around the
country saying one thing, and then we try to do it, and his leader in
the Senate objects. What are we doing instead? Well, a couple weeks ago
the Democrats manufactured a crisis over disaster aid when we could
have been debating the trade bill, the jobs bill, and we could have
been offering the Republican proposals we have to encourage trade, to
give this President and future Presidents new trade authority, to
reform the tax law, and to have a timeout on regulations that are
throwing a big, wet blanket, making it more expensive and harder to
create new jobs in America. That would have been the kind of debate we
could have had on the Republican proposals we believe would make a
difference in this urgent jobs situation which has given us 9-percent
unemployment for a longer period of time than at any other time since
the Great Depression.
So now this week, what are we doing? Well, we are debating a piece of
legislation. The Democratic leader has decided this is the important
piece of legislation to deal with jobs this week. And what will it do?
It will give a punch in the nose to China, our second largest trading
partner, our third largest export market, our fastest growing export
market, and the second largest economy in the world. History teaches us
what will happen. We saw that during the Great Depression. Perhaps it
was the cause of the Great Depression. We remember the Smoot-Hawley
tariff, the trade war that developed, the reciprocal punches in the
nose that countries gave to themselves over trade, plunging the world
into a depression.
So here we are in a fragile moment, when headlines are saying we may
be about to dip into a second recession, and what do we do? The
Democratic majority says their best idea about creating jobs is to
punch in the nose our second largest trade partner, our third largest
export market, and our fastest growing export market, even though we
know exactly what they will do to us. History teaches us they will
punch us right back in the nose, and the result will be a trade war,
which destroys jobs rather than creates jobs.
Such legislation as that now pending on this floor is not how the
world's strongest economy, the United States of America, should conduct
itself. Such legislation is a sign of weakness or lack of self-
confidence or defeatism that is not worthy of the United States of
America.
In Tennessee, we see the advantages of trading with the world,
including with China. China is our third largest export market, after
Canada and Mexico. Our leading exports are chemicals and agricultural
products. Tennessee exports to China totaled $1.85 billion, a 43-
percent increase over 2009. A little over 7 percent of all of our
exports went to China. In Tennessee, 116,000 jobs are related to the
export of manufactured goods; 5.3 million jobs in America. At a time of
joblessness, why should we be punching in the nose someone to whom we
might sell goods and that would create jobs in the United States?
What should we do instead? Of course, there is legitimate concern
about the way China values its currency. The administration should work
with China to change that. China should accelerate the appreciation of
its currency. But what else should the United States of America do? We
might take a lesson from history.
I remember 30 years ago, when I was just beginning my time as
Governor of Tennessee, China was not the country in the news. It was
Japan. There were books written: Japan, No. 1. The United States was,
as it is today, the world's largest economy, but everybody was
predicting: Watch out for Japan. Japan is becoming No. 1. The United
States cannot keep up with Japan, it was said. Their autos, their
computers, their electronic goods, their other sophisticated goods were
going to overwhelm our markets, and we would quickly fall behind.
There was in the early 1980s a $46 billion trade deficit with Japan.
What did we do? Well, we did not act defeatist. We did not play games.
We did not act as if we were the fifteenth largest economy in the world
instead of the first. We asserted ourselves. We went to Japan and said
to them: Make in the United States what you sell in the United States
and take down your trade barriers so we can sell in your country what
we make in ours.
I went there myself. I remember vividly going to Tokyo in 1979, in
November. I met with the Nissan officials. They were considering
locating a manufacturing plant in the United States. At that time, they
were making all of the Nissan cars and all the Nissan trucks in Japan
that they sold in the United States. But they wanted to be in this
market, which was and is the most profitable automobile market in the
world. So we said to them: Make here what you sell here. And they did.
They came to the United States. And where are we 30 years later? Nissan
is saying to us that they have operated for 25 years now the most
efficient automobile and truck plant in North America, and they are
going to be making 85 percent of what they sell in the United States
here in the United States.
Nothing has done more to create higher incomes and better jobs in
Tennessee than the arrival of Nissan and the Japanese industry,
followed by the American auto industry, in our State over the last 30
years. That is how a strong and confident country asserts itself in
world competition. That is not just true with automobiles, it is true
with many other manufacturing companies that have come to our State
from Japan and from other places. That is exactly the way we ought to
deal with China.
Our administration can assert itself in a variety of ways about the
currency issue. But we should not act as though we are afraid of China
anymore than we were afraid of Japan 30 years ago. We should seize this
as a moment of opportunity. We should not escalate a trade war that no
one will win. We should grow trade in sales and investment in China and
urge them to make
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in the United States what they sell in the United States. If they
should do that, that will create jobs here rather than destroy jobs, as
history teaches us a trade war will do.
I hope the Senate will decisively reject the legislation that is
being proposed to initiate a trade war with China.
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