Back to Work - Bill Clinton [70]
27. Pass the pending trade agreements with South Korea, Colombia, and Panama. We don’t have a trade deficit in goods and services with the countries with which we have trade agreements. That’s because the negotiations are tough and thorough, designed to meet both sides’ needs, and supported by enforcement mechanisms. Our trade deficit is largely with the countries we buy oil from and the countries we borrow lots of money from, China and Japan.
28. Enforce trade laws. We lost manufacturing jobs in every one of the eight years after I left office. One of the reasons is that enforcement of our trade laws dropped sharply. Contrary to popular belief, the World Trade Organization and our trade agreements do not require unilateral disarmament. They’re designed to increase the volume of two-way trade on terms that are mutually beneficial. My administration negotiated three hundred trade agreements, but we enforced them, too. Enforcement dropped so much in the last decade because we borrowed more and more money from the countries that had big trade surpluses with us, especially China and Japan, to pay for government spending. Since they are now our bankers, it’s hard to be tough on their unfair trading practices. This happened because we abandoned the path of balanced budgets ten years ago, choosing instead large tax cuts especially for higher-income people like me, along with two wars and the senior citizens’ drug benefit. In the history of our republic, it’s the first time we ever cut taxes while going to war.
29. Concentrate on increasing the export potential of cities, not just states. In 2010, the Brookings Institution issued a report, Export Nation, showing that our hundred largest metropolitan areas, already responsible for producing three-quarters of our GDP with two-thirds of our people, are best positioned to lead the drive to increase U.S. exports. In a nation where 11 percent of our GDP is in exports, even medium-sized cities, like Portland, Oregon, Youngstown, Ohio, and Wichita, Kansas, earn 15 percent or more of their income from trade. We need to get even more businesses in these areas involved in trade, by setting up centers that help smaller ones with the legal, financial, and other costs of entry, finding them trading partners in growing economies, and providing current and prospective employees with the necessary training, especially for jobs in manufacturing.
30. Export more services. We can export high-quality services not usually traded now, like education, health-care, and consulting services. For example, we can use the Internet for things like telemedicine, or send teams of people to other countries to develop services there, as U.S. universities have done recently in establishing universities in Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, or as Laureate International Universities has done, establishing a worldwide network of fifty-five universities in twenty-eight countries. We might be able to sell insurance policies in countries with a rapidly growing middle class, where life, property, and casualty policies are virtually nonexistent. People who know a lot more about this than I do should be charged with submitting a plan to maximize our exports in services.
31. Get to emerging opportunities before others do. The government can do more to help entrepreneurs and small-business people understand both what we can sell today and what we’ll be able to sell soon.
Here’s a great example. All over America, paper mills have closed, as we use less paper to communicate and other countries open their own mills. When a shuttered paper mill in southeast Virginia was put up for bid, Terry McAuliffe leased the forest and will install modern machinery that compresses wood waste into pellets with the same energy potential as lumps of coal. Two hundred fifty people will be hired to produce, pack, and ship the product. He’ll be able to sell all he can produce