President Obama this month officially started the process of winning congressional approval of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the largest trade agreement Congress has been asked to approve in years.
In this special report, five lawmakers weigh in with their early reactions to the deal. Click here all of their submissions.
—
The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) will surely create economic opportunities as well as risks for our businesses, workers and farmers. What those opportunities and risks are obviously depends on the substance of the agreement. But what we do as a country will determine whether we turn opportunity into reality, and what we do to minimize and share the risks, rather than sitting idly by as those risks fall disproportionately on the middle class and on the most vulnerable among us.
That means investing in ourselves and our future – in education, training, infrastructure of all kinds and research and development. We need to invest in our country to compete in the global economy.
While we do not seem to have a concrete plan or the political will to do this right now, our trading partners do. Canada, for example, is considering investing $1 billion just in its automotive sector in order to take advantage of the opportunities and minimize the risks that come from the TPP. In Japan, the TPP is viewed as part of an ambitious “structural reform” initiative — the “third arrow of Abenomics” — in which the Japanese government will help its farmers adjust and better compete in the global economy.
But in the United States, despite becoming more and more open to global competition, our public investments in things like roads and schools is lower today than it ever has been in the past 50 years, about 10 percent of what we invested in the 1960s. Earlier this month, we finally were able to pass a very modest highway bill through the House. But what we need is a transformative infrastructure bill, not a modest one that merely preserves the status quo.
Regrettably, the United States spends just 1.6 percent of our GDP on transportation infrastructure, while the rest of the developed world spends on average over 50 percent more than we do. Likewise, we spend just 0.1 percent of our GDP on worker training, whereas Germany spends eight times and Denmark spends 23 times that much. To compete in an increasingly global economy, the Commission on Inclusive Prosperity earlier this year recommended increasing our public investment in infrastructure by $100 billion annually over the next 10 years.
We must do far more to ensure that the benefits of trade are widely shared in our country. Economists generally agree that trade is contributing to inequality in the U.S. Much more needs to be done to change that. Failing to do so will erode public and congressional support for international trade.
We need to make the proper investments to compete in a global economy, just as we did when we transitioned from an agricultural to an industrial economy; when we emerged from the Great Depression; and when we built the largest middle class in history, after World War II, by giving our soldiers a chance to go to college and to own their own homes. Globalization is every bit as transformative as these other moments in our history — and we need to act now, just as we did then.
As chairman of the Ways and Means Committee when House Democrats became the majority in 2007, I helped develop the historic “May 10 Agreement” with the Bush administration. Under that framework agreement, four pending U.S. trade agreements were renegotiated to include — for the first time ever — strong and enforceable labor and environmental protections, and new provisions to better safeguard access to affordable medicines.
In the TPP, I of course want to see the May 10 Agreement preserved, or, even better, built upon. And I want to make sure the TPP truly opens markets and prevents our trading partners from gaining unfair advantages over our workers and businesses.
In the coming weeks and months, I will be examining the TPP closely to determine whether it meets these and other important objectives, and focus on what we do outside of the TPP Agreement. Namely, I will keep urging that we equip our young people with rigorous education, training and skills to be able to innovate and to compete against imports. I will keep calling for modernized infrastructure to efficiently meet the demands of our new economic reality. These are prerequisites to maintaining U.S. competitiveness and securing prosperity for our future.
Charles B. Rangel represents New York’s 13th congressional district and is the ranking member of the Ways and Means Trade Subcommittee. Thinking of submitting an op-ed to the Washington Examiner? Be sure to read our guidelines on submissions.
