John D. Negroponte, a deputy secretary of state and director of national intelligence in the George W. Bush administration, is chairman of the Council of the Americas. Mack McLarty, a former special envoy for the Americas and White House chief of staff in the Clinton administration, is president of McLarty Associates. Jim Jones, a Democratic former U.S. representative from Oklahoma, was White House appointments secretary in the Johnson administration. Rob Mosbacher Jr., the president of Mosbacher Energy, was president of the Overseas Private Investment Corporation during the George W. Bush administration. All are members of the Council of the Americas’ trade advisory group.
The U.S. economy needs swift approval of the pending free-trade agreements with Colombia, Panama and South Korea. Yet a week after the release of a disappointing employment report, procedural disagreement over a program that has provided benefits to American workers for almost 50 years is stalling the entire trade agenda.
Deficit reduction is an urgent task requiring intense scrutiny of spending measures. But it is counterproductive to delay long-overdue trade agreements that finally have a chance of passing over a relatively inexpensive assistance program designed to smooth out the rougher edges of the global economy.
Republicans have argued in the debt-ceiling negotiations that economic growth, rather than higher taxes, is key to raising revenue. At the same time, they understand that the United States will not achieve such growth without the benefits of international trade. Given political realities, the cost-benefit analysis should be clear: better to incur the fiscal cost of renewing the Trade Adjustment Assistance program than to lose the much greater benefits of free trade with three important trading partners.
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