President Obama's Proposals

Floor Speech

Ms. DeLAURO. Madam Speaker, last week, President Obama laid out a series of proposals: ``build new ladders of opportunity into the middle class'' and revive and sustain a core tenet of our American system--as he put it: ``the notion that if you work hard and take responsibility, you can get ahead.''

I could not agree more with many of the President's proposals. Increasing the minimum wage, supporting job training and education, and ensuring equal pay for equal work are all necessary to meet the serious economic challenges of our time: stagnant wages and the lack of upward mobility.

But the President's push for fast track authority for the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement, or TPP, flies in the face of these reforms. Twenty years after the NAFTA agreement involving Mexico and its $10 a day wages, we know that the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which includes Vietnam and its 28 cents per hour minimum wage, will depress wages. It will lead to the offshoring and the loss of American jobs.

Raising American's living standards, restoring the middle class, creating American jobs, and increasing wages--those are our economic goals. That is what we should achieve as a society. The Trans-Pacific Partnership fails on all of these goals, and we should defeat fast track.

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