Earlier today, we had two more meetings with staff for House Members that serve on the Ways and Means Committee: Reps. James Renacci (OH-16) and Pat Tiberi (OH-12). These were meetings #20 and #21 since the beginning of last week, and we have more coming up. Some of you might wonder, what do you do in these meetings and why do they matter?
What Do We Do?
At the most basic level, we make sure they know that GSP is scheduled to expire on July 31. Sounds obvious, but… Congress deals with many, many issues and if GSP importers don’t remind them about GSP, who will?
We also highlight some key facts and figures from our GSP Annual Report.
Most importantly, we show them the local impacts of GSP. For both of today’s meetings, that involved our new 2012 Ohio report:
Since our meetings were on the House as opposed to the Senate side, we used the Panjiva import/export database to find constituent companies importing goods receiving duty-free treatment because of GSP.
For Ohio’s 16th District, this includes well-known companies like Energizer, which imports batteries from Indonesia, and Moen, which imports faucet parts from Thailand and Turkey, as well as smaller companies like Zibex, which imports chemicals from India. Here’s what the district-specific information for Ohio’s 12th District looked like:
So when we set up meetings, drilling down to the most local level possible is always our goal. Tomorrow, we’ll talk about why it is so important.
