Graph of monthly trade balance figures of the US since 2000, in billions of US dollar, to be updated monthly, used in Handelsbalans, source of the figures: US Department of Commerce (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Since Bush I, when some of us began to argue loudly that a mindless ideological pursuit of free trade would imperil America’s industrial base, the total of U.S. trade deficits in goods with the world is approaching $10 trillion – 10 thousand billion dollars!
Might this humongous dumping of foreign goods into the U.S.A., killing our factories, and the liberation of our transnational elite to close plants, outsource production and bring foreign-made goods back free of charge into the U.S. market, have had something to do with killing the middle class?
The U.S. median income stopped growing in the mid-1970s, the same time we began to run 40 straight years of ever-expanding trade deficits.
And how are we doing with China?
Well, if one reads the weekend Wall Street Journal, Feb. 9-10, on page A3 in the lower left-hand corner is a box with a story headlined, “Trade Gap Shrinks 21 Percent as Oil Imports Decline.”