U.S. trade ambassador visits Richmond

U.S. Trade Ambassador Ron Kirk visited the Richmond region Thursday to discuss trade issues with local businesses and to talk up the Obama administration in an election year.

Kirk, the former mayor of Dallas, visited Dominion Resources GreenTech Incubator in Hanover County then headed downtown for a roundtable discussion at the Greater Richmond Chamber.

The visit, Kirk said, is part of the administration's effort to reach out and talk to businesses about what's happening on the ground.

A decision that "sounds good when we draw it up at conference table in Washington" might not work in the real world, he said.

Kirk sat down with the Richmond Times-Dispatch to discuss issues including workforce development, trade with China and green technology.

Here is an edited portion of that conversation:

Q: What has or can the administration do to help create jobs?

A: One [way to spur growth] is just using a lot of common sense, logic [and] recognizing that we're all under budget constraints. But there are provisions in our tax laws that disproportionally incentivize business to take manufacturing out of the United States.

The president says let's close those loopholes, let's take that money and apply that to incentives for businesses that are willing to bring those jobs, bring that manufacturing, back home and create those jobs here.

Q: The administration is pushing green technology. How is that going to change the U.S. economy?

A: We're looking at a world that now has more than 7 billion people.

If we're going to move 5 billion people out of poverty into a more advanced lifestyle, how are you going to house them? How are you going to feed them? How do you find the energy to run our homes and our businesses in an energy-constrained world?

We believe the economy that leads the race to develop the next generation of clean, alternative sources of energy will not only help drive our energy needs, but will help China as they seek to build new cities. And India. And Africa.

It's a simple equation. The president says we must out-educate, out-innovate, out-build the rest of the world.

Q: But how do you do that?

A: Looking at the amount of money we put into research and development; making sure that we don't allow the tax credit to expire that's helping millions of American families when they are all facing tough decisions; extending the payroll tax cuts even as we seek to attack the deficit; [and making] sure that the investments we make drive those areas that will grow the economy.

Manufacturing, innovation, reforming our workforce programs are the building blocks of an economy that's built to last.

Q: We've seen a rebound in manufacturing since the recession, but still a long-term decline in jobs. What specific policies or programs has the administration put in place to help continue the trend upward?

A: One of the most high-profile, and frankly one of the ones Republicans absolutely opposed at the time, was the decision to not allow the American automotive industry to die.

We understood this was about more than General Motors and Chrysler. We heard from a number of executives in the steel industry that without the American automotive industry, there wasn't a steel industry. There are hundreds of thousands of small business and suppliers whose livelihoods were dependent on that. And one of the industries leading the manufacturing renaissance is the automotive industry.

We're seeing other industries that have been aided by our export initiative. More American businesses realize [that] one of the components to keeping factories open from Iowa to Texas to Illinois to here in Richmond is that many of our customers now live somewhere other than the United States. But if the goods are engineered, innovated and produced [here], we're keeping those factory floors open.

The totality of what the president has done to invest in manufacturing, to make sure we have access to new markets, to enforce our agreements to make sure we can fairly compete as well, have helped build our manufacturing prowess.

Q: Does the administration believe China is manipulating its currency to gain a competitive advantage? What can you do about it?

A: The issue of currency manipulation is complicated enough that I'm going to defer [to previous statements by Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner].

We believe China's transformation from a closed government-run economy to an open-market economy has not only been good for China, it's been good for the world.

No country has benefited more from being admitted into the World Trade Organization over the last 10 years than China. And that has great promise because China has the ability to move 600 million people out of an agrarian lifestyle to a more modern one. The opportunity for American businesses to participate in growing that is a huge upside.

But it only works if China understands that with that richness comes a responsibility to adhere to some fundamental international trade principles of fairness and they need to open up their market the way we've opened ours to them.

We don't fear China's success. We applaud it. But the president has made it plain that we expect China to live and play by the same rules as every other member of the rules-based trading system. And where we can't get them to do so by persuasion, we will utilize every tool we have to get them to comply.