Grassley: White House Jobs Summit Should Include Focus on Expanding Trade

WASHINGTON – Sen. Chuck Grassley today urged the President to focus part of tomorrow’s White House jobs summit on creating good jobs in the United States by developing new market opportunities for U.S. products through expanded trade.

“The opportunities presented by pending trade agreements will have a real impact on sustaining and creating good-paying jobs in the United States,” Grassley said. “Meanwhile, while we’ve been standing still, our trading partners have been negotiating new trade agreements among themselves. If the United States fails to implement our pending trade agreements soon, we’ll put our producers and their workers at a serious competitive disadvantage. It would be senseless and irresponsible to do that.”

Grassley wrote to President Obama on the eve of the White House summit to focus on ways to create jobs in the struggling economy. Earlier this week, Grassley said the White House should focus on tax relief for small businesses, which create 70 percent of all net new jobs yet have been largely ignored in the stimulus plans of the administration and congressional leaders and are targeted for significant tax increases in the House of Representatives-passed health care bill.

Grassley, an Iowa Republican, is ranking member and former chairman of the Committee on Finance, which writes trade policy in the Senate.

The text of Grassley’s letter to the President on trade at the jobs summit follows
here.

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