But Chinese imports are through the dang roof!
Good news for people who like willfully misleading news: “U.S. exports to China hit record $120.8 billion,” declared a recent headline from the Washington Examiner.
That’s a lot! That’s a lot of exports, even if the composition of those exports are largely agricultural commodities and scrap metal. No matter. Now, just for kicks, let’s multiply it that three.
120.8 X 3 = 362.4. Now, let’s put a dollar sign before it and a billion after it, and bump everything down by 20 billion, because why not.
We’re now thisclose to $343 billion, which was the size of America’s 2014 bilateral trade deficit with China. That means while America sold around $120 billion worth of stuff to China last year, China sold approximately $465 billion worth of stuff to the United States. That import sum larger than the 2014 GDP of Austria. Meine Güte!
In fact, in May 2015 alone we imported $37.8 billion from China – the highest ever monthly U.S. trade deficit with that country on record.
How does this happen? Well, first Washington normalized trade relations with Beijing in 2000, without doing anything about China’s habit of intentionally manipulating its currency to give its exporters an artificial market advantage. Then, successive presidential administrations stayed mum about the currency problem (they continue to do so!).
A devalued currency – along with subsidies for key industries, dumped products in the US market when those industries can’t find anywhere else to sell it, constant corporate espionage carried out by the People’s Liberation Army, and a trade regulatory regime in the United States that’s slower than molasses – has swamped a lot American manufacturers.
Economists are starting to coalesce around the number of U.S. manufacturing jobs that vaporized because of Chinese import competition. The number is high.
And with the loss of so much industry, our annual China trade deficit has steadily creeped higher over the last few years. In 2011, it was $295 billion. In 2012, it was $315 billion. In 2013, $318 billion.
According to John Frisbie, president of the U.S. China Business Council, the growth of America’s exports to China is “greater than growth to any of the other top ten U.S. export markets, including our two largest trading partners, Canada and Mexico.”
But that export total was essentially the same total as it was in 2013.
Frisbie didn’t say anything at all about the absolutely stupefying level of Chinese imports that the American consumer wades through every day, which, to be honest, isn’t that surprising.