Mr. REED. Madam Speaker, I rise today in strong support of all three free trade agreements we will be voting on this evening. This is a great day. We are talking about, with the passage of these free trade agreements, approximately 250,000 new jobs across America. Those are new jobs that will put families back to work. They'll put roofs over their heads, put food on their tables, and allow them to enjoy the American Dream.
I rise in particular in regards to the U.S.-Panama agreement. Some of my colleagues, Madam Speaker, have argued that free trade has forced a lot of our manufacturing and industrial jobs to go overseas. Well, one of the facts of the circumstances can be illustrated by what's going on with U.S.-Panama. Right now our goods, as they go into Panama, face up to a 260 percent tariff at its borders. Yet the imports coming from Panama to America, because of the Caribbean Basin Initiative and the Caribbean Basin Trade Partnership Act, come to us duty free. That is an uneven playing field.
What these free trade agreements do, in my humble opinion, is even the playing field so that American workers can compete on an equal and level playing field. And if that is the case, I'm confident that the American worker and American families will always win in that competition. So I strongly support these trade agreements.
It's amazing to me that it has taken 5 years to get these agreements to this Chamber; but rather than point fingers at who caused what and what the reasons for those delays were, I always will look to the future. And what these agreements will represent is a step in the right direction of getting America back in a position where it competes in the world market and once again rises up and says we are the strongest, we are the best, and we will create 250,000 new jobs.