Has Anyone Heard of the Trade Deficit?

It seems not, since neither the NYT nor the Washington Post seemed to think that the $6.6 billion jump in the monthly trade deficit that Census Bureau reported on Friday was worth mentioning. Fans of arithmetic (a tiny minority among DC policy types) like to point out that a large trade deficit implies negative national savings. In other words, if we have a trade deficit then by definition the United States as a whole has a negative saving rate.

This means that we either must have budget defi...