Ross Perot Was Right

Town Hall during 1992 US Presidential Campaign between George Herbert Walker Bush, William Jefferson Clinton and Ross Perot.

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TRANSCRIPT

Questioner: Yes, I’d like to direct my question to Mr. Perot. What will you do, as President to open foreign markets to fair competition from American business and to stop unfair competition here, at home from foreign countries, so that we can bring jobs back to the United States?

Ross Perot: That’s right at the top of my agenda. We’ve shipped millions of jobs overseas and we have a strange situation, because we have a process in Washington, where after you’ve served for a while, you cash-in, become a foreign lobbyist, make $30,000 a month, then take a leave, work on presidential campaigns, make sure you’ve got good contacts, and then go back out.

Now, if you just want to get out of brass tacks, the first thing you ought to do is get all these folks who’ve got these one-way trade agreements that we’ve negotiated over the years and say, “Fellas, we’ll take the same deal we gave you.”

And they’ll gridlock, right at that point because, for example, we’ve got international competitors who simply could not unload their cars off the ships if they had to comply. You see, if it was a two-way street, they just couldn’t do it.

We have got to stop sending jobs overseas. To those of you in the audience who are business people, it’s pretty simple. If you’re paying $12, $13, $14 an hour for factory workers and you can move your factory south of the border, pay $1 an hour for labor, hire a young 25-year-old – let’s assume you’ve been in business for a long time, you’ve got a mature workforce, pay $1 an hour for your labor, have no health care, that’s the most expensive single element in making a car; have no environmental controls, no pollution controls, and no retirement, and you don’t care about anything but making money, there will be a giant sucking sound going South.

So if the people send me to Washington, the first thing I’ll do is study that 2,000-page agreement and make sure it’s a two-way street.

One last point here. I’ve decided I was dumb and didn’t understand it, so I called the Who’s Who of the folks who have been around it, and I said, “Why won’t everybody go South?”

They said, well, “It’ll be disruptive.”

I said, “For how long?” I finally got them up for 12 to 15 years.

And I said, “Well, how does it stop being disruptive?”

And that is when their jobs come up from $1 an hour to $6 an hour, and ours go down to $6 an hour, then it’s leveled again. But in the meantime, you’ve wrecked the country with these kinds of deals.