Matt Gaetz Quotes

The United States should adopt a protective tariff of such a character as will help the struggling industries of Europe to get on their feet.

And one of our points of continuing conversation with our trading partners is the urgency of their taking steps to remove barriers to their improved growth performance.

Instead of trade policy that is beneficial to American businesses and workers as well as our trade partners, we have a flawed trade policy that hurts all parties.

A key U.S. initiative in this trade war must be to develop reliable trading partners in the world.

We are on pace this year to have a trade deficit that is larger than $800 billion. We have never faced that before, but we continue to put forward trade agreements like these that leave us naked to competition that is neither free nor fair.

These agreements should be free trade. They aren’t free trade.

As commerce secretary, I led the Clinton administration's effort to ensure China's entry into the World Trade Organization and the permanent normalization of trade between the U.S. and China - steps that produced a 76 percent increase in U.S. exports to China in just three years.

China is the world's biggest exporter, but they're also the people with one of the highest tariffs on imports in the whole world. That seems a little bit oxymoronic.

I know something about trade agreements. I was proud to help President Clinton pass the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1993 and create what is still the world's largest free-trade area, linking 426 million people and more than $12 trillion of goods and services.

I am all in favor of growing the American economy and engaging in trade with the world, but not at the expense of American workers. The North American Free Trade Agreement is a perfect example of this. Ask the textile workers of North Carolina how NAFTA worked out for them - if you can find any.

Only Barack Obama consistently opposed NAFTA.

In a way, NAFTA is like a scrambled egg. How do you unscramble an egg? The value chains are so interwoven that it would be very difficult to do that. But government policies force us to look for ways to unscramble it.

The last thing a Trump administration plans is a trade war. The issue simply is getting a decent trade deal with each of the major trading partners.

America has lost one-third of its manufacturing jobs since NAFTA, a deal signed by Bill Clinton and supported strongly by Hillary Clinton. And by the way, the single worst trade deal ever made in history anywhere.

I'm a big free trader. But it has to be fair.

We want trade agreements that aid development and increase prosperity, growth and productivity at home and in our trade partner countries.

The way the textbook works is you have gains from trade that should be distributed across all the trading partners. As soon as one bad actor like China massively cheats, they win at the expense of us; they win at the expense of Europe, and over time, it threatens the entire integrity of the global financial system and the global trading system.

How can we have 'freer' free trade? Let's get real, for God's sake.

How does allowing China to constantly rig trade in its favor advance the core conservative goal of making markets more efficient?

The Trans-Pacific Partnership has the potential to reshape America's relationship with the nations of the Pacific Rim, enhance U.S. leadership in this critically important region, and provide a major boost to our economy.

Manufacturing value chains are global. Many U.S.-made goods have foreign components. Slapping on tariffs will raise prices and slow imports, but it will make us poorer and impede growth.

I support giving President Obama the ability to negotiate and complete new trade agreements with some of the fastest-growing economies in the world.

World leaders need to work together through the rules-based system of the WTO to tackle unfair practices, including the widespread dumping of steel on world markets at less than market price.

A scenario without NAFTA is something we have to think about.

If the two largest economies in the world don't show us a good example on trade liberalization, then you can't expect the smaller and weaker economies to take the risks. The initiative, the momentum and the drive really do have to come from Japan and the U.S.