Fair Trade

We need a new trade policy that creates decent-paying jobs in America and ends the race to the bottom. Corporate America cannot continue to throw American workers out on the street while they outsource our jobs and enjoy record-breaking profits. Despite the president’s tough rhetoric and haphazard tariffs, under Trump, we now have a record-breaking $890 billion annual trade deficit in goods. And since Trump was elected, multinational corporations have shipped 185,000 American jobs overseas. That is unacceptable.

As part of a new trade policy, we must:

• Eliminate the incentives baked into our current trade and tax agreements that make it easier for multinational corporations to ship jobs overseas. Corporations should not be able to get a tax deduction for the expenses involved in moving their factories abroad and throwing American workers out on the street.
• Instead of providing federal tax breaks, contracts, grants, and loans to corporations that outsource jobs, we need to support the small businesses that are creating good jobs in America.  
• We must also expand “Buy American,” “Buy Local,” and other government policies that will increase jobs in the U.S.  
• We need to make sure that strong and binding labor, environmental, and human rights standards are written into the core text of all trade agreements.
• We must also add to the core text of every U.S. trade agreement, enforceable rules against currency cheating, which allows countries to unfairly dump their products in this country and makes our exports more expensive abroad.  
• Our trade policies must support communities of color that have been impacted the worst by our unfair trade deals.
• Undo the harm that trade agreements have done to family farmers.
• We must eliminate rules in our trade deals that increase the cost of medicines.

Trade is a good thing, but it has to be fair.