Trump Recycles Overstated Campaign Claims About China and Trade
The report also notes that the United States "appears to have outperformed many other wealthy countries in the growth of manufacturing value added in recent years." "So we take in things free,
and yet, if you want to take a plant or you want to do something, you want to sell something into China and other countries, it’s very, very hard.
"Since China joined, that’s another beauty, the World Trade Organization in 2001, the United States has lost many more than 60,000 factories." True,
but … Mr. Trump has repeated this statistic at rallies before and after his election.
Under current United States law, the Treasury Department will specifically monitor a country’s currency if it meets three criteria: a large trade surplus, a material current account surplus (meaning the country is a net lender)
and "persistent one-sided intervention in the foreign exchange market." As of October 2016, China met the first two criteria, but not the third.
That’s an overall goods deficit of about $347 billion in 2016, in addition to a services surplus of about
$37 billion, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, for an overall deficit of $310 billion.
While Mr. Trump does broaden his claim to "other countries," he also ignores a
huge driver in the shift in the labor market: automation in the United States.
Both China and the United States have placed blanket bans on certain imports (for example, bald eagles in the United States), but none
that target only each other, according to the W.T.O’s database on import restrictions, though China does limit imports on American-made movies and other media and genetically modified agricultural products.
The United States imported about $463 billion in goods from China in 2016, but it also exported about $116 billion worth.
