Accounting Identities for Thomas Friedman

Thomas Friedman tells readers that we should want China to riase the value of its currency, but the real problem for the United States is that we are not building up our infrastructure and we don't save. While the first point is right, the second suffers from ignorance of national income accounting.

If we have a trade deficit then we must have negative national savings. At full employment, we will have a large trade deficit, unless our currency declines in value. This means that we will...