Currency Exchange Rate Oversight Reform Act of 2011

Floor Speech

Madam President, I rise to speak this afternoon about the legislation that is before us, the Currency Exchange Rate Oversight Reform Act, which got an overwhelming vote yesterday. There are not many times when a piece of legislation on a specific topic gets the kind of overwhelming support to move forward as we saw yesterday in the vote that took place, and now we are considering the bill.

When you go across Pennsylvania, if you drew a line down the middle of our State and moved to the east, a lot of communities were devastated by flooding. Other than that issue, the No. 1 issue for the people of our State--and I think the people of the United States in total--is the issue of jobs. In their frustration, they look to Washington for action and for solutions. Too often what they see when they turn on the television set or read about what is happening here, they see a lot of fighting, a lot of bickering, a lot of back and forth and, frankly, a lot of politics but not enough action on the question of jobs.

What we have before us is not some esoteric bill about currency, although it is somewhat about that. Obviously, it truly is not that. This is a bill that speaks directly to the frustration Americans feel and I know the people of Pennsylvania feel. There are not many places in Pennsylvania I can go where I talk about this issue of China for many years cheating on currency and us losing lots and lots of jobs because of it. Hundreds and thousands of jobs are lost because of that. There are not many places in our State where I can go to talk about that where the point of view that I express doesn't receive unanimous support.

This is a very real issue for people. This isn't far off. They know that, just as in other aspects of life, especially on something as consequential and significant as international trade--most people understand that when we are involved in that kind of endeavor, we have to play by the rules. Every country should play by the rules. When we have a country as big and as significant in the international economy or the international marketplace as China not playing by the rules, cheating time after time after time, giving their workers and their industries an unfair advantage, I think most people know what that means. It is not just a question of fairness and playing by the rules; it is the impact of that cheating, as Americans lose jobs and have lost jobs. So we have to take action. The time is up. We have been talking about this for years. We have been pleading with China in one way or another, urging them, pushing them, but the time for that is over. The time to act is now.

This is a prudent piece of legislation. It does a couple of things. Basically what it does is to at long last help American manufacturers and our workers by clarifying that our trade enforcement laws can and should be used to address currency undervaluation. It also provides an opportunity for us to improve oversight by establishing objective criteria to identify misaligned currencies and imposing tough consequences for offenders. So it doesn't put into place a new rule for international trade; it just says that if you violate the rules, there are going to be consequences and that our Treasury Department and our Commerce Department are going to take action no matter what administration is in office, a Democratic administration or a Republican administration.

I can point to a number of Senators in both parties--and I think I am one of them--who have been urging this administration and the prior administration to take stronger, more decisive action. For a variety of reasons, they haven't done that. That is not to say they haven't been working on it and not to say they haven't been pushing their counterparts in China, but I think we have been far too timid in the approach we take because, again, this isn't some far-off issue. This is about American jobs and whether we are going to stand by and allow more and more--tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands more--American jobs to be lost in the next decade as we have seen hemorrhage from our society in the last 10 years. One of the causes, one of the substantial factors in that job loss--not the only but one--is the cheating China does on its currency.

It is as if we are telling our workers and our companies: Look, we are going to have a foot race with Chinese companies and Chinese workers, and we are going to have this competition, as we have every day in the international marketplace, but China is going to start at the--if this is a 100-yard dash, they are going to start at the 20- or 25- or 30-yard line and then we are going to start the race and see how we do.

It is completely unfair to our workers. It undermines their ability to compete even if they are working as hard as they can, even if they have a high skill level, even if the company has invested time and training in those workers, has invested capital in the equipment and the technology. Sometimes it doesn't matter what the company does to improve its production, to improve its efficiency. It doesn't matter what the workers do. They can go to school and learn and prepare and get trained. But if they are at a 15- or 20- or 25-percent disadvantage--by the way, those are the lowest estimates. This has been a problem of above 30 percent or higher at times. But no matter what the percentage is, we know there has been a lot of cheating and we know it is costing us jobs. So it is time for action.
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This morning at the Joint Economic Committee hearing, we had Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke. I asked him about currency, and I actually read to him some statements he has made in the past about currency and about the adverse role China has played, the role about which I am as frustrated as any American. I asked him about that. The summation of his comments has been reported already, but in addition to commenting about the impact on our workers and our companies, he talked about the impact of China's currency policies on the global economic recovery. So this isn't just an adverse consequence for America, for the United States, this is an impediment to a full and robust recovery around the world. So this isn't just limited to the impact on our workers and our companies, it has worldwide reach, worldwide impact, and worldwide consequences.

So the United States is unwilling, so far, to crack down on China's currency and to crack down on what I would assert is manipulation. Some will say: Well, it might be something different than that, but I think it is basic manipulation--cheating. I think it is a step we have to take now, to have rules in place for how we react to their cheating and then to have very tough consequences. That is what is in the bill.

Unfortunately, this inability to respond appropriately or assertively or aggressively is one of many, I would argue, pieces of a flawed trade strategy that have been a prevailing point of view over the course of two administrations. We are going to have some debate about trade coming up, and we are going to see some interesting alliances, some interesting coalitions here. But our flawed trade strategy--if we can even call it a strategy--has failed over many years, failed our workers and failed our companies.

We will get to the debate on the trade agreements later, but at least today and this week we can finally make progress on an issue that has cost the American people lots and lots of jobs.

Let me give my colleagues a sense of what could happen if we are able to pass this legislation. In a report dated June 17 of this year from the Economic Policy Institute--one of the many think tanks across Washington of various points of view that have studied this issue--and I am broadly summarizing, but one of the many conclusions they reached about this issue is that if China revalued its currency by 28.5 percent--now, many would say it is a bigger problem than a 28.5-percent or 28.5-percent advantage their workers and their companies have--if they revalued to that level, at 28.5 percent, the growth in our gross domestic product in the United States would support 1,631,000 U.S. jobs. If other Asian countries also revalued their currency, then 2,250,000 American jobs would be created. So even if someone could prove those numbers are off by 10,000 or 20,000 or even if we could debate the number being off because some might reach different numbers--but I have seen numbers that high, and I have also seen numbers in the hundreds and hundreds of thousands of jobs.

So any policy we can enact here--in this case, being appropriately tough with China on the cheating they do on currency--if passage of legislation such as this, the one we are considering, leads to the creation of 1.6 million jobs just as it relates to having China play by the rules, why wouldn't we pass legislation to do that?

People are saying over and over to us, please do something about jobs. And sometimes the response is, well, we are trying, but we can't get agreement or we are trying, but we don't have all the solutions. We finally have a piece of legislation that will create jobs for sure and has broad and substantial bipartisan support.

We should pass this bill because it will send two messages that are badly needed right now from us to the American people--No. 1, that we are focused on job creation in the near term, not 10 years from now but in the next year or two. So it is a very specific answer to their request of us as their elected representatives that we focus on enacting legislation that will create jobs. Secondly, the message we will send to the American people is that we finally get it. Finally, Democrats and Republicans can come together on a very serious issue of great consequence to families who have been devastated by job loss; that we are finally coming together, Democrats and Republicans, working together to have a unanimous vote on a job-creation bill.

It is that simple. Anyone who tries to make it more complicated than that is probably trying to mislead because it is that simple. We need to focus our attention in the days ahead to get this legislation passed and to finally take action in a way that is directed at job creation in a bipartisan way.

Madam President, I yield the floor and note the absence of a quorum.

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