Quote:
Originally Posted by donquixote99
The point isn't the economics, which includes good effects as well, and may or may not involve increased debt. The point is what Trump believes, and he believes trade is a zero-sum conflict, and you're LOSING if you have a deficit.
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Can you post evidence that he's stated this?
I think that issue is something quite different. We're in a global economy now. The US net trade balance is actually looking pretty decent over the last couple month but historically it's concerning:
https://tradingeconomics.com/united-...lance-of-trade
An economy with less outflows of goods and services versus inflows is not, all by itself, necessarily a bad thing. But it can have a corrosive effect on the types of jobs available, and how much those jobs are worth in the economy. And that's what Trump, from my view, keeps coming back to in the argument about trade imbalances.
https://www.theatlantic.com/business...eficit/509912/
Trade deficits, even in times of strong growth, have negative, concentrated impacts on the quantity and quality of jobs in parts of the country where manufacturing employment diminishes. Even the economists who argue (incorrectly, we believe) that the trade deficit doesn’t affect the total number of jobs do admit that it affects the composition of jobs. There is, for example, a lot of research confirming that deindustrialization in the Rust Belt is partly a result of the fact that America meets its domestic demand for manufactured goods by importing more than it exports. One oft-cited academic study found that imbalanced trade with China led to the loss of more than 2 million U.S. jobs between 1991 and 2011, about half of which were in manufacturing (which worked out to 17 percent of manufacturing jobs overall during that time).* Further, the economist Josh Bivens found that in 2011 the cost of imbalanced trade with low-wage countries cost workers without college degrees 5.5 percent of their annual earnings (about $1,800). Far from a small, isolated group, these workers represent two-thirds of the American workforce.