Kill Free-Trade As an Obama Agent to Redistribute Your Wealth

Open e-mail to Rep. Neugebauer:

Randy,

An article in the September 26 issue of C&E News concerns free-trade deals and Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA).

Let's start by saying that we should scrap the whole idea of free trade. It is free trade, which has partially gotten us into the economic mess we are in.

Wages in the United States are considered about the highest in the world. For that reason, many manufacturers have gone overseas, with a resultant loss of US manufacturing jobs. We have become a service economy. In order to regain our economic power, we not only need a service economy but also internal manufacturing.

The way to do this is to scrap free-trade and apply custom duties to all manufactured goods coming into the states in order to equalize foreign and US labor costs.

The alternative is to continue the route which we are still embarked on, which means shipping jobs overseas. It is only for that reason that Trade Adjustment Assistance was considered. It means providing health and employment benefits and retraining workers at high and unnecessary government expense for workers who lost jobs because of foreign competition .

The existing free trade policy is exactly what Pres. Obama has been advocating to redistribute wealth on a global basis. As magnanimous as that sounds, we are not in position to do this anymore. In spite of recent degradation in our economic system and GDP, we still have one of the highest standards of living in the world. We want to preserve what we still have left and not be forced to distribute our wealth among other countries of the world by government edict. Other countries can lift themselves by their own bootstraps, as we have previously done.

I find it interesting to be on the same side as the a AFL/CIO, deputy who says "This is the wrong time to put at risk good jobs in our manufacturing sector".

Advocates of free trade will immediately point out a reciprocity issue. They will claim that as we impose import duties, other countries will do the same, which will then work against US exports. I say let them do so, it will be to their own disadvantage, because there are many areas where the US has superiority in production. Let foreign governments explain to their people why they are imposing in import duty on US produced wheat.

I strongly encourage you to do everything possible to defeat ratification of the three free-trade agreements which will be considered by the House in the next few weeks.