The US has a Trade Deficit Because We're Rich -- At Least Some of Us

Donald Trump has a serious Twitter problem. No, I'm not talking about "covfefe". (Trump seriously needs to get more sleep.)

I'm talking about him using Twitter to sabotage our relationship with our NATO allies.

“We have a MASSIVE trade deficit with Germany, plus they pay FAR LESS than they should on NATO & military,” an angry Mr. Trump said on Twitter on Tuesday morning. “Very bad for U.S. This will change.”

Has Vladimir Putin stolen Trump's Twitter password, or is Trump just following the orders Sergei Kislyak gave him when the Russian ambassador visited the White House?

No, it's not that: Trump is just being dense again. As has been pointed out in numerous places, German companies build a lot of their cars in the United States:

German companies employ roughly 700,000 people in the United States. Carmakers like BMW and Mercedes-Benz have huge American assembly plants, which export vehicles to China and Latin America. BMW’s factory in Spartanburg, S.C., is the largest single exporter, by dollar value, in the American automotive industry. 

Yeah, the trade deficit can be a problem. But the real reason that we have a trade deficit with most (though not all) of the rest of the world is that the United States is the richest and most successful country in the world.

Being the richest country in the world means we have the most disposable wealth. In 2015 the average American salary was higher than every other country in the world except Luxembourg, which also has a trade deficit.

Luxembourg's banking sector is a huge part of its economy, just as finance is in the United States and Switzerland, which has the third highest average salary. Banks don't build a lot of cars.

Since we're so rich, other countries step up to sell us things. We don't have to buy those things, but a lot of rich Americans like to buy expensive things from foreign countries. Things like Italian marble:

Trump himself, after riding down an escalator through the tower’s six-story atrium, announced his candidacy from the sky-lit basement level, perched on a temporary platform rigged over the basin of a sixty-foot waterfall that—along with twenty-four hundred tons of rose-colored Italian Breccia Pernice marble—is the atrium’s signature feature.

Donald Trump bought 2400 tons of rock from Italy. Wasn't American rock good enough for Trump?

Trump bitches about German manufacturers who have invested billions of dollars in the United States to build factories in states like South Carolina, Tennessee and Alabama. Japanese car manufacturers have plants in Ohio, Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee and Indiana. Korean companies have factories in Georgia and Alabama.

Not only does Donald Trump import Italian marble, Trump and his offspring import foreign workers using the H-2A program. Two months ago this happened:

Trump Vineyard Estates, owned by Eric Trump, is seeking permission to hire 29 foreign workers through the federal H-2A visa program to cultivate grapes at its Virginia winery, the Associated Press reported Tuesday. The immigration program lets agricultural employees temporarily hire foreign workers to do the jobs Americans don't want or can't do.

This is an ongoing thing:

This isn't the first time a Trump business has looked to hire outside the U.S. Trump's older daughter and close adviser, Ivanka Trump, has also shown a preference for foreign workers. Her jewelry line applied for five guest worker visas to hire foreigners from 2008 and 2013 at salaries from $41,370 to $45,000, a Huffington Post investigation found last year.

And while Trump promised on the campaign trail to create new jobs for American workers and vowed to come down hard on trade deals that benefit foreign labor markets, companies owned by the New York business mogul requested 1,100 foreign worker visas between 2000 and the time he entered the presidential race in 2015, according to a Reuters analysis of Department of Labor data. Trump's Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Florida, sought the most foreign workers, with applications for 787 workers such as maids, cooks and servers since 2006 under a H-2B visa program that tends to benefit Mexicans.

"You cannot get help during the season. The season goes from like October to March. It's almost impossible to get help," Trump explained at one point during his campaign. "And part of the reason you can't get American people is they want full time jobs."

Maybe Trump could find Americans who would work part time if he would pay them enough money, instead of hiring Mexicans and Romanians.

The United States used to be the biggest exporter in the world. Our workers got great salaries. But then the rest of the world started to catch up to us. American CEOs started building factories in countries with lower wages.

People like Donald Trump shipped manufacturing off to China:

[V]isitors to the Trump Store in the lobby of the Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue in New York City, or to the displays of Trump clothing at Macy's in New York's Herald Square, would be hard-pressed to find much labeled "Made in the U.S.A."

At the same time Trump was speaking in New Hampshire, his Trump Store was contributing to the growth of Chinese manufacturing, arguably at the expense of American workers, selling $80 Trump-branded cotton sweaters and $70 Trump-branded warm-up tops, all made in China. Also available with the made in China tag: golf hats stamped with the Trump crest and stuffed animals.

Trump claims he had to do this because China was manipulating their currency. Nonsense. Trump can't find an American supplier for an $80 cotton sweater? That's 10 cents worth of raw materials and a dollar worth of labor, even in America -- sweaters are made on automated looms these days. The only reason that $20 sweater cost $80 was because it said Trump on it.

Like all the other corporate shills, Trump just wants more profit for himself. He could have put more money in the pockets of working Americans, but he wanted more. So he sold America out.