As California’s senior Senator, Dianne Feinstein has built a reputation as an independent voice, working hard to find commonsense solutions to problems facing California and the nation.
Since her election to the Senate in 1992, Senator Feinstein has built a significant record of legislative achievements across a wide range of issues.
Senator Feinstein led a bipartisan group of senators in passing legislation to drastically increase the fuel efficiency of cars. She was a leading voice in the effort to legalize gay marriage and ensure rights for LGBT Americans. She’s a champion for the preservation of the Mojave Desert, Lake Tahoe and California’s forests. She helped create the nationwide AMBER Alert network, passed bills to criminalize border drug tunnels and has long focused on improving California’s water infrastructure and reducing the threat of wildfires. She also continues to advocate for commonsense gun laws.
California’s Gross Domestic Product is an estimated $2.7 trillion, making it the 5th largest economy in the world.
Foreign trade is critical to California’s economy, supporting more than 4.7 million jobs. California leads the nation in agriculture and services exports, and is second in manufactured goods exports.
Here is how trade benefits three important sectors of California’s economy:
Services
The services sector, which includes professional services and jobs in hotels and restaurants, has led California’s economic recovery since the 2008 recession. In 2014, 66 percent of new California jobs were in the services sector.
In 2013, California exported $114 billion in services, a 58 percent growth over 2006.
California’s top services exports include:
Merchandise
In 2018, California exported $178.4 billion in merchandise. More than 70,000 California companies export goods, and 96 percent of those are small- or medium-sized businesses with fewer than 500 employees. An estimated 632,000 jobs in California are supported by exporting goods.
Computer and electronic products, which accounted for $45.2 billion of total merchandise exports in 2018, is the largest category of manufactured exports.
Agriculture
California’s agriculture industry, the largest in the United States, also relies heavily on export markets. In 2013, California’s agricultural exports were valued at $21.2 billion, nearly half the $46.4 billion output from the state’s 77,900 farms.
Trade is essential for the global agricultural economy, since there is an advantage to growing certain crops in specific regions and during specific seasons.
California produces about 80 percent of all the almonds consumed in the world. Almonds account for approximately 25 percent of California’s agricultural exports. California almonds are estimated to create 104,000 jobs in California and add $11 billion to the state’s economy.
Trade Adjustment Assistance
Despite the benefits of trade to California and its economy, Senator Feinstein recognizes that trade has a negative effect on some American workers. That’s why she strongly supports Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA). TAA provides workers who have been displaced by trade job with retraining and other assistance.
In June 2015, Senator Feinstein voted for legislation to renew the Trade Adjustment Assistance program through June 30, 2021, with a $450 million annual budget.
In fiscal year 2013, 7,609 Californians received training under the program.
The Department of Labor estimates that since 1975, more than two million workers have relied on this program to receive supplemental income assistance and additional training needed to find new employment.