The Congressional Record is a unique source of public documentation. It started in 1873, documenting nearly all the major and minor policies being discussed and debated.
“EXPORT POLICY” mentioning the U.S. Dept. of Commerce was published in the Senate section on pages S1593-S1594 on March 14, 2011.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
EXPORT POLICY
Mr. BROWN of Ohio. Earlier today in Columbus, OH, the State capital of my great State, I was at the Ohio State University's Fisher College of Business. We talked by phone with Under Secretary of Commerce Francisco Sanchez, who is one of the leaders at the Department of Commerce, on how to grow exports in this country.
The President has charged the Congress, our businesses, encouraged all of us to find ways to double exports as a major path to economic growth, especially to grow manufacturing in our country. We know that for the last several months, we have seen manufacturing growth, albeit too small, but manufacturing growth in this country.
That is especially important in Ohio. My State is the third leading manufacturing State in the country, behind only California and Texas, States which are two and three times our size in population. Yet Ohio has kept pace with doing relatively well in manufacturing. But we know what has happened to manufacturing in our country in the last 30 years.
Only 30 years ago, manufacturing was more than one-quarter of our GDP, financial services was about 10 or 11 percent of GDP. In these 30 years that position has almost flipped. Financial services is over one-
quarter of our GDP, manufacturing is only 10, 11, or 12 percent. That is why the President and his push on exporting is so important, not that we only export manufacturing goods, of course, we export services, as we should. But clearly manufacturing is a major component of that.
I sit on the President's Export Advisory Council with leaders of the administration and the CEOs of some of America's largest companies and many successful mid-sized and small companies in this country. We had a meeting last Friday with Secretary Locke, Under Secretary Sanchez, Secretary of State Clinton, Jim McNerney of Boeing, Ursula Burns of Xerox, Alan Mullaly of Ford, as part of the President's export council.
In Ohio, as a result, I have put together an export advisory council. We met today in Columbus. That is what our meeting was about, to talk about ideas. We heard from Albert Green of Kent Displays, William Dawson of NexTech Materials, Philip Irwin of Ametek Solidstate Controls, Randall Willaman of Command Ilkon, Inc., Mark Friedman of National Biological Corporation, Arlinda Vaughan from Volk Optical, and Ken Hagen from Fosbel.
All of them raised concerns directly to the Under Secretary of Commerce and directly to me, concerns about corruption in Russia, concerns about tariffs in Brazil, concerns we all face and all of our companies face in breaking into the Chinese market, and many other concerns about everything from medical devices to export of services and all of that. So the meeting was important.
I will mention one other. Susan Helper, the head of the Economics Department at Case Western, had particularly good thoughts about how we grow manufacturing in this country. We know those jobs are created by medium and small businesses. We also know that fewer than 1 percent of American companies actually export. Even as close as we are to Canada or to Mexico, only 1 percent of our businesses export. So we know we have to do much more.
In Germany, for instance, 20 percent of their workforce is in manufacturing. They have a trade surplus with the rest of the world, while we have a huge almost insidious trade deficit. Germany has done some pretty interesting things in encouraging manufacturing.
As many people point out, we have not had in our country a manufacturing policy. I spoke with Pat Russo tonight, who is the former CEO of Lucent Technologies and a couple of--she sits on the General Motors board and a couple of other people from the GM board I spoke to, and talked about the fact that we do not have a manufacturing policy in this country. That is why we are seeing other countries begin to do much better in manufacturing, while we have, by and large, drifted in our policies and our strategies on manufacturing.
There are several things that came out of this meeting that we need to do. We need to pay particular attention on economic development assistance and creating economic development partnerships and business incubators.
We need to pay special attention to help those companies get access to capital. That has been a vital roadblock--as the Presiding Officer from Oregon has been involved--a roadblock to our full economic recovery. We need to look at our R&D tax credits.
Part of a national manufacturing policy should be increases in R&D tax credits, including making 48(C) a part of the Code that encourages conservation, encourages more efficiencies in energy production and in energy use, making 48(C) permanent.
It means workforce training--our Sectors Act, which matches up what local businesses and labor unions and community colleges and workforce investment boards do to retrain workers so they find jobs after that training. That is why we are doing at end of the month our fourth annual Ohio College Presidents Conference, where I invite in some 55, 60 college presidents. We have done it for the last 3 years, since my second year in the Senate, to talk about these issues: How do we encourage people to become engineers? How do we help with access to college, particularly in light of the fact that Republicans are trying to cut Pell grants several hundred dollars per student, sometimes a couple of thousand, $3,000 a family, whatever.
How do we fight back and make sure that students have access to education and to our higher education system, those who choose to go to college? We have a lot of work to do. All of this includes, as I said at the White House the other day in the meeting of the President's Export Council, while we work on exports, we need to fix our trade agreements, we need to fix our tax policy, we need to make sure those workers who lose their jobs because of trade--and this is so often forgotten about by my Republican colleagues--workers who lose their jobs because of trade have to be compensated. They need to be retrained. They need to keep their health care. That is why the Presiding Officer and I and many others have to fight for the extension--Senator Casey especially from Pennsylvania--of trade adjustment assistance and the health coverage tax credit, two long-time Federal programs. The TAA, Trade Adjustment Assistance, was started bipartisanly under President Kennedy in 1962.
Those are so important for workers who have lost jobs through no doing of their own but because of trade agreements passed wrongfully, wrongheadedly in this body and in the House. Because of trade agreements they have lost their jobs. We need those workers to have the opportunity to be retrained and to continue to keep their health insurance after they have been laid off through no fault of their own.
Our efforts to double exports is extraordinarily important for economic growth. At the same time it is important that we are sensitive to those workers who have lost their jobs because of trade policy. We can do this right. We can enforce our trade laws more aggressively as President Obama has begun to do. We can work on trade agreements. We can fix trade policy so it actually helps American workers and American consumers. Instead of practicing trade policy adopted out of a textbook that is 20 years out of print, we ought to be adopting a trade policy that is in our Nation's national interest. As we move with President Obama and this Congress toward a manufacturing strategy and, even better, a manufacturing policy such as most of the rest of the industrialized world has, we will all be in a better position to build a middle class in Oregon and Ohio and across the country.
I yield the floor.
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