Key Trump Ally Sen. Ron Johnson backs outsourcing, says it’s better to have products made ‘dirt cheap’ overseas
(WISCONSIN) — Sen. Ron Johnson was caught on video this week supporting shipping Wisconsin jobs overseas in a meeting with commercial real estate agents. For the last four years, Republicans have abandoned working families in Wisconsin in favor of the wealthy and well connected. Trump and Johnson then allowed workers to suffer in a pandemic that was made worse by their gross mismanagement. It is more clear than ever that Sen. Johnson and Donald Trump do not care that Wisconsinites are suffering every day because of his failed leadership and disregard for working families.
Read key points here:
- U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson argued for shipping more manufacturing jobs overseas this week in a presentation to commercial real estate agents.
- “From my standpoint, when we don’t have enough workers in this country right now, that’s a real limitation to our economic growth,” he said, according to a video of the event. “To me, it makes no sense for American workers to produce high-labor-content products. Let the billions of people around the world do that and provide us these goods — high quality, dirt cheap.
- “That to me is economically efficient. Unfortunately, we’re probably going to retrench from that, that type of policy, and I don’t see how it’s going to particularly work.”
- U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan, a Democrat from rural Dane County, called the comments “stunningly out of touch.”
- “It was spoken like a true robber baron would speak,” he said Thursday. “It’s pretty amazing that the senator from a state that has been hit so hard by outsourcing, by jobs going to Mexico and overseas, would find the answer to providing families with family-supporting wages is to continue to outsource more things overseas.”
- Johnson’s latest comments are in line with others he’s made over the years about manufacturing.
- In 2014, he told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that outsourcing was “quite beneficial to America.” He also said Republicans were wrong to raise outsourcing as an issue against Mary Burke, a former Trek Bicycle Corp. executive who was the Democratic candidate for governor that year.
- “I don’t want to demonize or demagogue against” outsourcing at Trek, he said then.
NOTE: This press release was submitted to Urban Milwaukee and was not written by an Urban Milwaukee writer. While it is believed to be reliable, Urban Milwaukee does not guarantee its accuracy or completeness.
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