Last week we used the Hanjin bankruptcy as an opportunity to reinforce our state’s dependence on global trade.
AWB president Kris Johnson and Washington Council on International Trade president Eric Schinfeld have an op-ed in The Olympian that makes the point more directly.
With more than 40 percent of our jobs tied to trade, Washington state is bound to benefit greatly from the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Even the TPP agreement’s biggest opponents have to be impressed with the findings of the recent Association of Washington Business and Washington Council on International Trade TPP study: as much as $8.7 billion in additional exports and up to 26,000 new jobs in Washington if the agreement were in place last year.
We wrote about that study here.
Johnson and Schinfeld tackle opponents’ arguments head-on.
We cannot risk missing out on this opportunity to compete on a level playing field and establish high standard rules for trade. Without the TPP, there is no incentive or enforcement mechanism to get the other countries to meet these high standards. While we delay, other countries are racing ahead with trade agreements that disadvantage us and fail to make these improvements.
So much is at stake if we fail to implement the TPP, and we urge Congress to vote on it by the end of the year and ask the members of the Washington congressional delegation to support this historic trade deal.
As we’ve written previously, one of the more troubling economic developments in recent years has been the erosion of the bipartisan consensus supporting global trade.
Johnson and Schinfeld make the right argument. The facts support them.
