Defending Public Safety Employees' Retirement Act
Floor Speech
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Mr. SHERMAN. Mr. Speaker, if you vote for this bill, you get fast track without Trade Adjustment Assistance. There is no assurance Trade Adjustment Assistance will come to this floor or that it will come to this floor in a form that either Republicans or Democrats will support.
The supporters of this deal can't make their case without repeating demonstrably false statistics. The fact is we won a $177 billion trade deficit in goods with the countries with which we have free trade agreements. The $75 billion surplus in services brings the net to over a $100 billion deficit.
How have so many Members been misled by charlatan lobbyists into coming to this floor and giving false statistics? They are given this slippery phrase: Go down to the floor and talk about what has happened since NAFTA.
Now, ``since NAFTA'' usually sounds like, well, since the early 1990s. What they mean is excluding NAFTA. Excluding NAFTA when we review free trade agreements is like excluding LeBron James when you evaluate the Cavaliers.
This bill is catastrophic for our national security. It hollows out our manufacturing base, and it is the greatest gift to China that we could possibly make because it enshrines the sacrosanct nature of currency manipulation. It says, in the future, countries can manipulate their currency all they want and there will be no accounting for it.
In addition, the rules of origin provisions allow goods that are admitted to be 50 or 60 percent made in China--that are actually 70 or 80 percent made in China--to get fast-tracked into the United States. So China gets 80 percent of the benefit of this agreement without having to admit a single American export.
As for Vietnam, our workers are going to have to compete against 56-cent-an-hour labor.
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Mr. SHERMAN. We are told that we will get free access to the Vietnamese markets. Vietnam doesn't have freedom. Vietnam doesn't have markets. They are not going to buy our exports any more than their Communist Party decides to do so.
The chairman points out that with trade comes influence. That is right. There will be Nike lobbyists here, financed by this bill and its effects, lobbying against going after Vietnam for its oppression of religion and its oppression of unions. So they will have influence here in Washington. They will continue not to have freedom, and we will continue to lose jobs.
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SERVICES TRADE BALANCE WITH FTA COUNTRIES
According to the Department of Commerce Bureau of Economic Analysis, we ran a surplus in services of $75 billion with FTA Countries as of 2013, the last year for which we have data on our services trade broken down for the FTA countries as a group. Assuming normal growth for 2014, our surplus in services is roughly $77 billion.
Therefore, our TOTAL TRADE BALANCE with FTA partner countries is just over $100 billion. We run a significant deficit with FTA Countries.
Explanation: There are different methods for measuring the trade balance of the United States. The table above uses the most accurate data for measuring the value of goods (merchandise) actually ``Made in the USA'' and exported from the United States to the various countries listed. The source for our goods data is the International Trade Commission (ITC) dataweb, available at http://dataweb.usitc.gov. ITC measures exports in two different ways (``Total Exports'' and ``Domestic Exports'').
We use ``Domestic Exports.'' According to the ITC, ``Domestic Exports measures goods that are grown, produced and manufactured in the United States, or goods of foreign origin that have been changed in the United States.'' FTA proponents like to use an alternative measurement, ``Total Exports,'' which ``measures the total movement of goods out of the United States to foreign countries,'' whether those goods were made or altered by U.S. workers in the United States or not--it includes goods that were simply transiting the United States without alteration. Counting these ``Re-Exports'' that are included in the ``Total Exports'' measurement will give a distorted bilateral trade balance for given countries because it drastically over-counts exports. For similar reasons and in order to give an accurate, apples to apples comparison, on the import side we use ``Imports for Consumption'' which includes only imports that are not re-exported. Using the alternative ITC measurement for imports, ``Total Imports,'' would overstate imports by counting those goods coming into the United States that are going to be re-exported. See http://www.usitc.gov/publications/332/tradestatsnote.pdf for more on these terms and what the measurements represent.
Services data. Ideally our nation's trade balance figures would provide the trade balance for both goods and services. However, services are more difficult for government agencies to track, and the agencies therefore do not break the trade data down consistently for every partner country, every year. Also, the agencies cannot compile services data as quickly as merchandise data. We use a 2013 services balance figure for FTA countries in the aggregate that the Commerce Department's Bureau of Economic Analysis provided to the Chamber of Commerce for a report touting FTAs. We assume growth of about $5 billion in the positive services balance for 2014. See the Chamber report for these services data at https://www.uschamber.com/sites/default/files/open Xdoor Xtrade Xreport.pdf.
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