It never gets better. Just worse. And along with trade deficits come the loss of good jobs. But U.S. corporations don’t care about that. They are reeking big profits by moving operations abroad to take advantage of cheap, repressed labor abroad:
The U.S. trade deficit increased to a record $73.3 billion in August as a small gain in exports was swamped by a much larger increase in imports.
The Commerce Department reported Tuesday that the monthly trade deficit increased 4.2% in August, rising to an all-time high, surpassing the previous record of $73.2 billion set in June. The trade deficit represents the gap between what the country exports to the rest of the world and the imports it purchases from other countries.
In August, exports rose 0.5% to $213.7 billion, reflecting revived overseas demand. But imports, even with all the supply chain problems at ports, were up an even stronger 1.4% to $287 billion.
The politically sensitive deficit with China surged 10.8% to $31.7 billion.
Even a pro-business outlet like CNBC has to admit that trade deficits are a bad for the U.S.:
China trade deficit has cost the US 3.7 million jobs this century, report says
The U.S. has lost 3.7 million jobs since 2001 due to its trade imbalance with China, with most of the damage done to manufacturing, according to a report released Thursday.
As the deficit has continued to swell, American workers have suffered, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington, D.C., generally considered to be left leaning.
The facts speaks for themselves. Trade deficits began to appear in 1976. At around the same period manufacturing jobs in the U.S. began to decline. In the 1978 the number of manufacturing jobs peaked (month of December) at 19.3 million jobs (source: Bureau of Labor Statistics). They’ve been declining ever since then. Today about 7 million jobs are in manufacturing. Manufacturing is what built the American middle class.
There is clearly a connection between trade deficits and the loss of U.S. manufacturing jobs.
The 99 Percenters 