Bio: Chairman
U.S. Economy/
Smart
Globalization
Initiative
at the
New America
Foundation

In his January State of the Union Speech, President Obama first committed his administration to the goal of doubling U.S. exports within five years. Mr. Obama said that this will “create two million jobs, about the same number that the U.S. manufacturing sector has shed during this economic downturn.” His administration spokesman said just the other day that “the U.S. is on track to hit this export target.”

There are three problems with this pledge. First, doubling U.S. exports would create just 10 percent of the 22 million new jobs we need, and yet, combined with multiple new free trade agreements (FTAs), it seems to be the only specific jobs policy coming from the White House. Second, this strategy wrongly overshadows the more critical imperative of ‘import substitution’. Third, the first three FTAs being proposed — with South Korea, Panama and Colombia — are very poorly negotiated and will cause even more American jobs to be lost overseas.

As the United States Business and Industry Council (USBIC) just concluded:

“the President’s decision to limit his trade-related recovery policies to export expansion efforts is too narrow, since the most promising source of the new orders needed by U.S.-based manufacturers and their workers are home market shares that have been lost to imports.”

And as the economist Clyde Prestowitz has determined, with plenty of supporting evidence, “the more free trade agreements the U.S. has entered into, the bigger America’s trade imbalances have become and the less our allies have seemed to like or pay attention to us.”