The conventional establishment economic view is this: If we have a trade deficit, the way to correct it is to export more. Obviously this would be true, except that the main point and problem is being totally ignored.
The real problem is not that we export too little, but that we import far too much! We’ve simply become far too dependent on the production of others elsewhere. We don’t need more trade. We need much less trade than we have today. We ship products from the other side of the world, at great material and environmental costs, that we should be making right here.
Why not save on shipping, and produce jobs that produce for us! That is the question nobody seems inclined to ask. We did it before. It worked. We thrived and prospered as a nation and a people. Why not do it again?
There are two main sources of our trade deficit. (1) We use a lot more petroleum-based energy than we produce, so we import vast quantities of oil. We got the big wake-up call on this back in the early 1970s when OPEC slapped an oil embargo on, and we found out what gas lines are. Only now, 35 years later, we are finally beginning to talk semi-seriously about “energy independence.” It’s about time! Of course they talked about it back in the 1970s too.
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