That Record Merchandise Trade Deficit Is 4.3 Percent of GDP

It is always fun, even if tiresome, to mock Donald Trump for getting things wrong. This is why the jump in the merchandise trade deficit last year to $891.2 billion was especially newsworthy.

Trump had made the trade deficit one of the central issues in his campaign and promised to reduce it to bring back good-paying jobs in manufacturing. He was going to use his skills as a negotiator to get better deals from our trading partners. For this reason, the fact that the deficit is going up, not d...