Free Trade Agreements with South Korea, Columbia, and Panama

Floor Speech

Mr. President, I want to remind my colleagues that this work period was supposed to be our opportunity to finally enact, after years of delay, the Free Trade Agreements with our allies South Korea, Colombia, and Panama.

These agreements were signed over 4 years ago, and this administration has had more than 2 1/2 years to submit them to Congress for consideration, but they have failed to do so. Unfortunately, we are going to have to continue to wait at least until September before we get a vote.

Why does it matter that we pass these agreements? It matters for two reasons: first, because expanding trade opportunities creates American jobs; second, because we live in a competitive global economy and other nations are not standing still while we delay.

Economists overwhelmingly agree that expanding trade opportunities creates jobs. The Obama White House, for example, estimates that enactment of these three trade agreements will boost exports by at least $12 billion, supporting over 70,000 American jobs.

The fact that lowering barriers to U.S. exports will create jobs for American workers is common sense. Consider that our market is already largely open to foreign imports, including those from Korea, Colombia, and Panama. Without trade agreements to ensure similar treatment for our exporters, American businesses will continue to face high tariff and nontariff barriers abroad.

Consider one example: the market for agricultural products in Korea, which is the world's thirteenth largest economy. Korea's tariffs on imported agricultural goods average 54 percent, compared to an average 9-percent tariff on these imports into the United States. Mr. President, 54 percent added on for us to get our agricultural products into Korea; only 9 percent for them to get those same products into the United States, that is a 45-percent differential.

Passage of the Korea Free Trade Agreement will level this playing field. Yet this administration continues to delay sending the agreements to Congress. The Obama White House would prefer to hold these agreements hostage because of a desire to expand the Trade Adjustment Assistance Program rather than improve the competitive position of American producers.

At a time of near record unemployment and slow economic growth, this delay is unacceptable. I want to put a fine point on that by saying that just this morning the numbers came out. The Bureau of Economic Analysis released its advance estimate of growth in the inflation-adjusted gross domestic product, GDP, for the second quarter. According to the advance estimate, annualized GDP growth in the second quarter was 1.3 percent.

They went back and revised the first quarter of 2011. They revised it downward to .4 percent, down from a reported rate of 1.9 percent. So they have adjusted downward the first quarter growth rate from 1.9 percent down to .4 percent, and we now know, according to the advance estimate at least, that second quarter GDP growth is only 1.3 percent--way under what the assumptions have been, way under what the estimates have been, and way under what it is going to take for us to get the economy turned around and growing again and get people back to work.

Couple that with the job-crushing regulations, the taxes that have come since this administration has taken office, and it is making it very difficult for our economy to recover and to grow and to get back on track. So the administration wishes to hold these agreements hostage because of their desire to expand the Trade Adjustment Assistance Program rather than get these producers back access to these markets we should have access to in some of these countries, and we cannot afford to wait any longer to do that.

The reasons are very clear. We have an economy that is sluggish, that is struggling to get back on its feet. We have three free trade agreements that have been hanging around here languishing literally now for 4 years that would open up export opportunities and, as I said, even according to the President's own estimates, add 70,000 jobs to our economy.

The position of Leader McConnell and Republican Senators has been consistent from the beginning. We are happy to have a debate on the merits of expanding trade adjustment assistance and to consider this bill as a stand-alone measure. But we will not hold the trade agreements hostage to consideration of trade adjustment assistance.

I want to commend my colleagues Senators PORTMAN and BLUNT for the letter they recently spearheaded with 10 other Republican Senators committing to support the necessary procedural votes to consider trade adjustment assistance as a stand-alone measure and on its own merits.

In light of this letter, it is very clear the administration has run out of excuses for not submitting the trade agreements to Congress.

I ask unanimous consent, Mr. President, to have the Portman-Blunt letter printed in the Record.

There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in the Record, as follows:

U.S. SENATE,

Washington, DC, July 19, 2011.
President BARACK OBAMA,
The White House,
Washington, DC.

Dear Mr. President: as Republican Senators, we urge you to submit the Korea, Colombia and Panama trade agreements as soon as possible, with the understanding that we will support a separate Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) bill that reflects the bipartisan reforms negotiated by Chairmen Baucus and Camp and the White House.

In order to move this process forward, we commit to supporting cloture on the motion to proceed to such a TAA bill and cloture on the bill itself. We believe that the trade agreements and TAA should receive separate up or down votes on their merits.

We therefore urge you to separate the pending trade agreements and TAA, and immediately submit the three trade agreements to Congress.

Sincerely,
Roy Blunt, Scott P. Brown, Rob Portman, John Boozman, John Hoeven, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Johnny Isakson, Ron Wicker, Dan Coats, Thad Cochran, Mike Johanns.

Mr. THUNE. There is a path forward in both the House and the Senate for trade adjustment assistance, and we have bipartisan majorities in both Chambers waiting to vote for the Korea, Colombia, and Panama agreements. So why are we still waiting for the White House to do the right thing and send us these agreements?

This ongoing delay is having a real impact on American businesses, and it will only get worse. On July 1, the European Union-Korea trade agreement went into effect. According to press reports, European exports to Korea rose 16 percent in the first 13 days after the Korea-EU Free Trade Agreement entered into force.

Let's be clear about what this means. Korean consumers are choosing to buy German, French, and British cars, electronics, and agricultural products rather than American-made products because these European products now have a price advantage. This was entirely preventable if we had acted on the U.S.-Korea agreement sooner.

Likewise, the Canada-Colombia agreement will go into effect on August 15. This will result in an advantage for Canadian goods, such as construction equipment, aircraft, and a range of other industrial and agricultural products. Much as with Korea, the United States businesses will find themselves at a competitive disadvantage because we have failed to act.

Again, this did not have to happen. The administration finalized its labor action plan for Colombia back in April. We have had plenty of time to consider these agreements over the past several months. Instead, we are facing a situation where United States wheat producers are likely to be completely shut out of the Colombian market once the agreement with Canada has gone into effect.

This is amazing, when you think about it, when you consider that just a few years ago American wheat producers dominated the market in Colombia with a 73-percent market share. That was as of 2008.

In 2010, for the first time in the history of United States-Colombia trade, the United States lost to Argentina its position as Colombia's No. 1 agricultural supplier.

Consider the story of three crops we grow in South Dakota: soybeans, corn, and wheat. The combined market share in Colombia for these three U.S. agricultural exports has decreased from 81 percent in 2008 to 19 percent as of 2010--a decline of 62 percentage points in a 2-year period; an 81-percent to a 19-percent market share in corn, wheat, and soybeans, for American agricultural producers. Think about that. That is a staggering collapse, which was totally avoidable, totally preventable, if we had simply acted on these trade agreements much sooner. This is the real cost of our delay while our trading partners continue to pursue new regional and bilateral trade agreements.

We are living in a global economy where America cannot afford to stand still on trade. As Senator Baucus noted at a recent Finance Committee hearing, in 1960, exports accounted for only 3.6 percent of our entire U.S. GDP; today, exports account for 12.5 percent of our GDP. Exports of U.S. goods and services support over 10 million American jobs.

It is long past time we get back in the game by passing the three pending trade agreements. America's manufacturers, America's farmers, and America's service providers cannot afford to wait any longer. So I call upon the administration to submit the trade agreements to Congress before the August recess. We are not going to be able to consider these agreements until September, but sending them to Congress now will send a strong signal that this administration is finally serious about getting them done. It would also be an important show of good faith to our close allies, South Korea, Colombia, and Panama. These job-creating, market-opening trade agreements should be at the top of the agenda when we get back in September.

Again, I want to reemphasize the importance of that in light of these economic numbers, the data that is coming out that points out that in the second quarter of this year our economic growth was a sluggish 1.3 percent, and that the revised estimate now for the first quarter of this year was .4 percent.

We will never get the unemployment rate down, we will never get America's economy expanding and back on its feet, we will never start dealing with these massive debt issues we have, one, if we do not cut spending--which is the other issue we are debating today--but also if we are not growing and expanding the American economy.

We can do that. There are so many things these trade agreements would do not only for agricultural exporters but for other producers of American goods, and we ought to be doing that. It is high time we at least do some of the things we can do to get the economy growing again. I cannot emphasize enough the lost market opportunities, the lost chance at economic growth, the lost jobs that are associated with the fact that this administration has delayed now, since they have been in office--2 1/2 years--in submitting these three free trade agreements to Congress, three free trade agreements that have broad bipartisan support from Congress, which we as Republicans have been waiting to act upon now for almost the 4 years since these agreements were negotiated in the first place.

So it is high time we change that. It is one thing that we can do to affect the economy in this country, among the other things. I would simply add as sort of a final point, the debate we are having about the debt limit is also one that needs to be dealt with if we are going to get serious about growing the economy and creating jobs.

If we look at the economy, we look at this President's economic record, and we look at the data, almost every metric we can measure, he has made this economy much worse. The President has said repeatedly--and he said it in his speech the other night--he blames the previous administration for where we are today. I do not think anybody here will dispute the fact that he inherited a difficult set of economic circumstances. But there is no question, if we look at every metric, that he has made the situation much worse.

Whether that is unemployment, which is up 18 percent--there are 2.1 million more people unemployed today than there were when he took office--whether it is the debt, which has grown by 35 percent since he took office; whether it is the number of Americans who are receiving food stamps, which has gone up by 40 percent since he took office--and I might add in my State of South Dakota, a 58-percent increase in the number of people receiving food stamps.

The cost of health care in this country is up 19 percent since this President took office. The cost of gasoline has gone up almost 100 percent--99 percent--since this President took office. The amount of the debt per person in this country has gone up by $11,000. Every American now owes $11,000 more as their share of our Federal debt since this President took office.

The economic record of this administration is abysmal. It is high time we took the steps to do something about that. It strikes me at least, as I look at the policies they have been putting in place, that they seem to want to make it more difficult and more expensive for people in this country to create jobs. We see that in regulations coming out of all of these various agencies. We see it in the massive runup in the growth, in the size of government, the new mandates that have been imposed on a lot of our small businesses as a result of the new health care bill, the new taxes that have been imposed on our small businesses as a result of the new health care legislation.

At every turn American small businesses, which create the jobs that will get this economy growing again, tell us the economic uncertainty, the job-crushing policies that are coming out of this administration have been a major inhibitor, a major impediment to them creating jobs and getting people back to work in this country.

The trade agreements are just something I would add on to that list. We have three trade agreements that have been teed up. It has been almost 4 years since they were negotiated. This administration has been in office now for 2 1/2 years. The President continually gets up, as he did at the State of the Union, and talks about wanting to double the trade in 5 years, talks about supporting these three trade agreements. Yet it is a very simple thing. All he has to do is submit them to Congress. The trade agreements are negotiated. All he has to do is send them here. We are ready to act to put Americans back to work, to open up export opportunities to American producers, to get the economy growing again, and create jobs.

I hope in addition to dealing with the issue of runaway spending and debt, which, in my view, is the predominant issue we need to deal with--and, clearly, between now and Tuesday we have to get a solution in place that will avert the economic adversity we could be dealing with, the adverse circumstances if we do not deal with that. But that needs to be accompanied by serious reductions in spending, spending reforms. Then we have to be putting in place policies that will enable economic growth in this country, that will make it less expensive, less difficult for small businesses to create jobs, not more difficult.

Unfortunately, that is the record to date of this administration. I hope we can change that and start today by sending these trade agreements to the Congress so we can act on them and get these things approved and get American businesses exporting to these three countries.

I yield the floor.

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