Op-Ed
Last week, the president-elect traveled to a Carrier furnace plant in Indiana to announce that he had made good on his promise to bring 1,400 Carrier jobs back to the United States. In fact, however, 600 jobs at that factory will still move to Mexico, and another factory of that company still intends to close. A factory around the corner from Carrier, Rexnord, still intends to move its jobs to Mexico. All of this shows the need for effective trade policies. Occasional phone calls or negotiating monetary inducements or threats to a company are no substitute for real policies.
Fifty years ago, we as a nation declared a war on poverty and began our mission to create policies that help lift families out of poverty, improve nutrition and health care, and promote work. This effort has succeeded in reducing poverty in America by nearly 50 percent in 2014.
Now, there’s definitely more work to do. Today, 47 million Americans live in poverty, including one in five children.
Trade negotiators are meeting right now in Atlanta to continue work on the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement, a sweeping new trade deal that would cover a dozen countries that represent 40 percent of the world's GDP. One of the many sticking points relates to automobile manufacturing—specifically a complicated numbers-based arrangement known as the "Rules of Origin," which entangled the last round of TPP negotiations in late July.
The Republican majority in Congress has said that the inability to govern is following the same failed strategy time and again. Yet, once again House Republicans are putting the full faith and credit of the United States at risk. Their repeated behavior is reckless and irresponsible, and has had real consequences.
Five years ago, our nation moved away from an increasingly expensive and inaccessible health-care system. We finally declared that health care is not a privilege for a few, but a right for all Americans. Five years later, through the Affordable Care Act, all Americans now have a health-care system with vital protections, and more affordable and accessible coverage.
The debate on trade in Congress is not about whether Democrats support trade, or whether we take the side of businesses or labor; it's about getting trade right. Indeed, because of our efforts, the most recent trade agreements to pass Congress were updated to include enforceable worker rights, environmental standards, and provisions to safeguard access to medicines to combat AIDS and other diseases around the globe.
Eight years ago, Charlie Rangel and I worked with our House Democratic colleagues to co-author what became known as the "May 10th Agreement" on labor and environmental standards in trade agreements. For the first time, fully enforceable labor and environmental standards would be placed into our trade agreements on equal footing with every other commercial provision. May 10th also included important provisions on medicines, investment, and government procurement. U.S. trade agreements with Peru, Panama, Colombia, and Korea were re-negotiated to include May 10th.
*Cross-posted from Politico.
The Trans-Pacific Partnership is a major potential trade agreement between the United States and 11 countries at very different levels of economic development, including Japan, Mexico and Vietnam. Will the agreement boost U.S. growth, address wage stagnation, help our strategic partners and create legitimate rules for international trade in the 21st century? The answer hangs in the balance.
Last year, House Republicans reacted to the tax reform proposal from then-Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp with a "blah, blah, blah, blah." That reception, echoed in the overall chilly Republican reaction, stemmed in part from that plan's honesty.
Chairman Camp had pledged not to increase the deficit with his proposal. To achieve that goal, he played it straight - at least within the first 10 years.