The White House intensified its push for more aggressive trade agreements on Thursday touting a fifth consecutive record breaking year for U.S. exports.
U.S. businesses exported $2.35 trillion in exports in 2014, which includes $289 billion in merchandise from Texas, $174.1 billion from California, $90.6 billion from Washington state, $58.6 billion from Florida, $31.3 billion from North Carolina, and $29.7 billion from South Carolina. Each of these states, aside from Florida, hit record numbers in 2014.
In North Carolina, chemicals were the leading export accounting for $5.7 billion in exports following by $4.1 billion in electrical products and $4.0 billion in transportation equipment.
“Exports have been a key driver in our economic comeback,” Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker told reporters Thursday.
The Obama administration is lobbying hard to win support for trade in Congress. Interestingly, much of their work is focused on Democrats who are concerned the impacts past trade deals have had on U.S. jobs, particularly blue collar jobs.
In a meeting with reporters Thursday, Pritzker joined Labor Secretary Tom Perez and U.S. trade representative Michael Froman to discuss the benefits of labor deals, such as the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP.
Perez said he understood the concerns about jobs. They’re real concerns, he said. A South Carolina textile workers, he said. But he said there were a lot of additional forces at work that led to closing of textile factories, including globalization.
He described TPP as “renegotiating NAFTA” with more enforcement and better labor protections.
“What’s different is NAFTA didn’t go far enough,” Perez said. “The labor provisions were not baked into NAFTA. They weren’t in the DNA of NAFTA. The side agreements didn’t work.”