Despite promises to shrink the U.S. trade deficit with crazy tariffs on imported goods, the trade deficit has instead reached record highs as it grew to some $621 billion.
On Wednesday the Commerce Department announced that Trump has fucked the trade deficit to the highest its been since 2008 in large part due to the fact that the president doesn’t have any clue as to what he’s doing.
According to NPR, “The overall trade deficit has grown by $119 billion in the two years since Trump took office.”
“We have almost an $800 billion a year trade deficit with other nations,” Trump said in November 2017, NPR reports. “Unacceptable. We are going to start whittling that down and as fast as possible.”
Trump was supposed to bring the deficit, “which is the difference between the goods and services the U.S. buys from other countries and those it sells to them,” to a reasonable measure with his tariffs on imported goods. Instead, the deficit rose to an almost 19 percent increase by the end of December, NPR reports.
From NPR:
The goods trade deficit with China rose to a record $419.2 billion, despite Trump’s decision last year to impose tariffs on $50 billion in imports from the country.
He has also threatened to raise tariffs on another $200 billion if no progress is made in ongoing negotiations with Beijing.
Trump also slapped tariffs, which are a kind of tax on imported goods, on steel and aluminum imports, a move that led to retaliation from some U.S. trading partners.
The trade gap is growing in large part because the U.S. economy has been strong compared to other major countries. That typically means Americans buy more from other nations.
Most economists do not consider a trade deficit to be a marker of economic weakness. But Trump has consistently singled out the trade gap as a target in his America First policies. Ironically, the administration’s tax cuts may have actually helped to increase the trade deficit by juicing spending on overseas goods by consumers and companies.
So far the president is on pace to break a few records during his term in office. He’s already set the benchmark for lying and it looks like he’s going to continue to widen the gap on the deficit.
Nice job.