Middle Class Economics

Floor Speech

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Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Speaker, I thank Mr. Garamendi for bringing us
together again. He is truly a leader on growing American jobs, all of
the way from California, way out on the west coast, to the gentleman
from New York's community on the east coast. I commend both of you for
your dogged determination to keep expanding the recovery and doing
everything we can to help the American people have increasing paychecks
and fulfilling work and a good family life where they are able to raise
their children and fulfill their dreams, whatever they might be.

I just wanted to come to the floor and talk about America's trade
policies for a brief moment and the records. Statistics don't lie, and
our trade policies have been costing us more jobs than they have been
yielding us for a very long time. The trade policies that have been
enacted have actually caused the United States to cumulate since 1976 a
staggering number--$9.5 trillion--in trade deficits. That means more
imports coming in than our exports going out. Translating that into
lost jobs, foregone jobs, 47.5 million lost jobs in that little over a
quarter century.

The American people say: Why do we have a budget deficit?
Well, I will tell you why. When you lose this much productive wealth
inside your country to other places, our people start to backslide, and
they have been backsliding since the 1980s. Despite our hard work here
to try to make a difference, trade policies have an enormous impact on
the ability of the American people to maintain a standard of living and
to both remain in the middle class or aspire to it and earn their way
forward.

It now takes two in a family to earn enough, whereas when I grew up,
our father worked and that was enough to support our family--until he
became ill, and that is a whole other story. But today, it is so hard
for people to have two people working in the family and hold their
household together. They are scrimping every week as to where they are
going to put their limited incomes.

I just wanted to put this so people start thinking: How did America
get in this deep a hole on trade? I believe before we sign any more
trade agreements, we ought to go back and fix what is wrong with the
current ones. Wouldn't that makes sense?

They promised us with Korea, which is one of the most recent
agreements, that we would be exporting 50,000 automobiles over there.
It hasn't happened. In, fact we have already lost 17,000 additional
jobs because of the Korean agreement not being in balance.

So I think we have to be rigorous and ask ourselves: How do we fix
this for the sake of the future, not just this generation but the next?
I have a long list, and I am going to be coming to the floor many
evenings going through this list, talking about companies that we have
known in this country and where they have relocated. I know that the
workers in those places and the executives who used to run those
companies, I know how hard they worked to create great American
products, and they didn't deserve the fate they were dealt because of
bad trade policies.

Let's look at Huffy Bicycle in Celina, Ohio. Huffy Bicycle used to be
known coast to coast. It was made in western Ohio, and it actually
became and is currently a Wal-Mart supplier. Unfortunately, well over
1,000 people lost their jobs at Huffy Bicycle in Ohio in the late
1990s--1998--and the plant first moved from Ohio to Missouri, and then
it moved from Missouri to Mexico, and then it made its final move from
Mexico to China.

So if you look at Huffy Bicycle today, you will see the paint job is
not the same. You will see the tires aren't the same. The quality of
the metal is not the same. It is not the bicycle that used to be made
in Ohio that lasted a lifetime.

So there has been a knockdown, a decrease in quality, that has come
with that manufactured product, which is then shipped back here to the
United States and sold in different locations. It is kind of sad,
really, what happens.

I love chocolate. I used to really like to buy Hershey bars, and I
still eat Hershey. But Hershey had always been manufactured in
Pennsylvania--in Hershey, Pennsylvania. In fact, when you walked
through Hershey, you could smell the chocolate in the streets. It was
just absolutely captivating. But if you have noticed, Hershey has
changed. The recipe has changed. They will deny it, but a large part of
their production was moved to Mexico. They even had to change the
wrapper to withstand the warmer temperatures, and the recipe changed,
and all of those workers in Hershey, Pennsylvania, in 2011. That
happened in 2011. These are brand-name products that we know in our
country.

Dell--Dell had been located in the Carolinas, and in 2009 they moved
to Mexico, too. So you think about the manufactured products that we
have known, and companies like Bank of America that had offices in
Cincinnati, Ohio, and Independence, Ohio, they moved production to
Mexico too, in 2013. So if people think they are safe in their service
job because they are not in manufacturing, they will be very surprised
to learn that the service jobs will follow.

How many phone calls have you gotten in your home from a call center
located in--and it could be anywhere in the world but here. And I
always ask the person from the call center:

Where are you calling from and how much do you earn?

I find that their earnings are so low they can't buy the very product
that they are selling over the telephone. What kind of world are we
creating?

The markets that exist in other places like Korea, Japan, and China
are closed to us. We are racking up these gigantic trade deficits
because we can't get our products in there, and the people in those
places don't earn enough money to buy some of what we export. So it is
really a rather vicious cycle. I am not going to take up much more time
except to say that I believe where America went wrong was about 30
years ago.

We should have signed a trade relationship with Europe which shares
our political and legal values. They subscribe to a rule of law: ``We
can do business.'' Though their markets aren't completely open, they
are pretty open, and we could work with them.

Then we should have invited into that structure, which starts with a
belief in democracy and representative government, these other
countries that are aspiring to be better than they are, but without the
political advancement, their economic system will never work for them
without the rights the American people have.

We could have invited in Mexico. We could have invited in the CAFTA
countries. We could have invited in Korea, et cetera, to that union of
democracy-loving republics. We didn't do that.

What worries me over time is, in the end, we might be cashing out our
very liberty because, if you look globally at what is happening, you
will find in those places that the people are not treated well that are
doing this work. Over time, what kind of residue does that leave toward
our country and toward those who are their new overlords?

I have walked through some of these places; I have walked through
some of these companies. I remember walking through with our mother--
God love her--when she was still living, through one company in Mexico.

She said, ``Marcy, look at the women's faces,'' and I did. They were
so afraid. They were afraid of their boss. They were afraid of us. They
were afraid of losing their work because there was no worker
representation. What kind of a world are we contributing to in these
other places that most Americans will never visit?

I thank the gentleman. As I see your title there, ``Grow American
Jobs,'' I would say, ``Grow American democracy. Grow representative government at the same time as we do trade.''

I think we really got way out of kilter back in the 1980s when these
agreements began to be imbued with the kind of power they had.

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Ms. KAPTUR. I appreciate your focus on growing the middle class and
helping those who aspire to be in it to be successful in that journey.
There is no question that when you have a robust middle class, it
creates the demand that then buys the products from the corporations
across this country that want to earn dividends, so that they can share
those with their shareholders.

Growing the middle class drives our economy and it creates the jobs,
and the people who do those jobs really create the company, they make
the company work.

It isn't the shareholders who are down there on the lines, although I
believe very much in shareholder equity for workers. I wish I could
encourage more of it. Wouldn't that be great if they could all have a
part of the indexes that the wealthy invest in? Because they certainly
have earned it.

Through good jobs with decent wages, through the transportation and
infrastructure bill I hope we can pass this year, which would be one
action we could take that would help to give a big boost to this
economy from coast to coast, all of that can help lift people's boats
across this Nation.

I join in alliance with my two dear colleagues, Congressman Tonko and
Congressman Garamendi, who are down here all the time. You are such
good Representatives from your respective States, fighting on behalf of
the American people.

Most of the rest of the place has gone home, but you are on the job.
You remind me of members of my family. They always worked overtime.

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