Quotes About CAFTA

It is my belief CAFTA will be beneficial for Alabama and the United States as a whole.

I fear that CAFTA will accelerate the demise of these domestic textile jobs.

U.S. corn exports to CAFTA countries will benefit from reduced tariffs and duty-free access for corn products.

If you consider that a typical Central American consumer earns only a small fraction of an average American worker's wages, it becomes clear that CAFTA's true goal is not to the increase U.S. exports.

There's a lot of exaggerated talk about CAFTA, but it's actually a fairly routine trade agreement. Although it involves fairly small nations, they're still more important trade partners than places like Australia or many other larger nations.

Likewise, free trade does not, as evidenced in CAFTA, mean fair trade.

The biggest share of U.S. exports to the six CAFTA nations is not the traditional job-creation kind. These are products that are not consumed in the purchasing nations.

The reason CAFTA should be enacted is not economic benefits: it is national security.

Well, look, let me put it this way. Back in 2005, when I was a freshman, I - I was the first Democrat to support CAFTA. My labor union folks made me their number-one target. They came after me, and I'm still here.

The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, who is fond of the phrase, has gone so far as to claim that free-trade treaties are so good that supporting them doesn't require knowledge of their actual contents. "I wrote a column supporting the CAFTA, the Caribbean Free Trade Initiative," he told Tim Russert in 2006. "I didn't even know what was in it. I just knew two words: free trade."11