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Cancel Trade Benefits for Offshoring
U.S. Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL)
October 31, 2024
Last month, President Donald Trump made waves by threatening to impose a tariff on John Deere for moving production to Mexico…. [A]s I said in my own letter to John Deere this August,…CEOs are free to outsource American jobs—but policymakers are free not to reward them for doing so….
America became an industrial juggernaut thanks in no small part to common-sense tariffs and trade protections…. After the World Wars, however, a coalition of Washington insiders and industry elites…lowered tariffs across the board…and…created trade agreements and programs that offered duty-free treatment to imports from dozens of countries.
Lowering trade barriers makes sense in certain circumstances…. But the purpose of any American trade deal should be to strengthen the American economy and make the United States a more attractive place for business—not to incentivize offshoring. Unfortunately, the abandonment of our trade protection heritage did just that.
Today, America offshores or outsources roughly 300,000 jobs per year. This allows corporations to skirt their obligation to their workers and the country…and instead profit from other countries’ lower labor costs…. This hits vulnerable populations hardest, a dynamic that’s been playing out in African American communities for decades….
[W]hy should John Deere receive special treatment for outsourcing production? …[W]hy should it not be subject to the normal duty rate for members of the World Trade Organization…? That rate is already the world’s lowest standard—by a hefty margin. CEOs who wince at the prospect of paying it demonstrate only indifference to the nation that made them great and a blind devotion to shareholders’ demands for short-term returns over sustainable, long-term investments.
In the coming weeks, I will introduce a bill to cancel trade benefits for companies that offshore production…. This is how we ensure our trade deals work for the citizens who elected us to fight for them…[,] and it’s how we ensure the American economy remains strong for years and decades to come.