The new House Ways & Means ranking member, Richard Neal (D-MA), is urging the incoming Trump administration to resume Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership talks with the European Union — adding that he asked President Obama two years ago to prioritize those negotiations over the Trans-Pacific Partnership — and warned that a border adjustment provision in the House GOP blueprint for tax reform must be consistent with WTO rules.
[Daily News| January 12, 2017 |Inside US Trade]
“I don’t see how we turn our backs on 500 million consumers in Europe. I think that we’ve got to figure out a way — they have a similar lifestyle — and I think we’ve got to figure out a way to get this back on track,” Neal said of the TTIP talks, which were put on ice in September 2016.
“It’s going to be hard to argue, for example, that the Europeans don’t have a good health care system; it’s going to be hard to argue that they don’t have growing economies,” Neal added. “So I want to find a path that we can, in a bipartisan way, understand that there should be some opportunities but not to deny the reality of TTIP and its potential, if we can find that path.”
