Here's an interesting article by Dean Baker explaining (or partly explaining, because yo have to factor in the mad trade wars) why the US runs trade deficits with China. [ps this also explains the disgruntlement which Trump rode into office]
"The New York Times ran an article last week with a headline saying that the 2020 Democratic presidential contenders faced a serious problem: “how to be tougher on trade than Trump.” Serious readers might have struggled with the idea of getting “tough on trade.” After all, trade is a tool, like a screwdriver. Is it possible to get tough on a screwdriver?
While the Times’s headline may be especially egregious, it is characteristic of trade coverage which takes an almost entirely Trumpian view of the topic. The media portray the issue of some countries, most obviously China, benefiting at the expense of the United States. Nothing could be more completely at odds with reality.
China has a huge trade surplus with the United States, about $420 billion (2.1 percent of GDP) as of 2018. However, this doesn’t mean that China is winning at the expense of the United States and because of “stupid” trade negotiators, as Trump puts it.
The U.S. trade deficit with China was not an accident. Both Republican and Democratic administrations signed trade deals that made it easy to manufacture goods in China and other countries, and then export them back to the United States.
In many cases, this meant that large U.S. corporations, like General Electric and Boeing, outsourced parts of their operations to China to take advantage of low-cost labor there. In other cases, retailers like Walmart set up low-cost supply chains so that they could undercut their competitors in the U.S. market.
General Electric, Boeing, Walmart and the rest did not lose from our trade deficit with China. In fact, the trade deficit was the result of their efforts to increase their profits. They have little reason to be unhappy with the trade deals negotiated over the last three decades.
It is a very different story for workers in the United States. As a result of the exploding trade deficit, we lost 3.4 million manufacturing jobs between 2000 and 2007, 20 percent of the workers in the sector. This is before the collapse of the housing bubble led to the Great Recession. We lost 40 percent of all unionized jobs in manufacturing.
This job loss not only reduced the pay of manufacturing workers, but as these displaced workers flooded into other sectors, it put downward pressure on the pay of less-educated workers generally. This is a pretty awful story, but it is not a story of China tricking our so-called stupid negotiators; it is a story of smart negotiators who served well the interest of corporations."
http://cepr.net/publications/op-eds-columns/china-did-not-trick-the-us-trade-negotiators-served-corporate-interests
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