Another Reason The Trade Deficit Is Not A Problem

See Moricinomics by E. Frank Stephenson of "Division of Labor."

"Our favorite tv copier salesman is peddling more nonsense. To wit:

Oil and trade with China account for nearly the entire $550 billion trade deficit. This deficit is a tax on domestic demand that erases the benefits of tax cuts and stimulus spending.

This is a common fallacy--and one that Don Boudreaux has been especially vigorous in challenging. Trade deficits--be they for oil or stuff made in China--are merely the accounting flip side of net captal inflows, something that may increase domestic demand.

But suppose Americans didn't buy several hundred billions of dollars worth of oil from abroad (and ignore the resulting decreasing net capital inflow). We'd have to do without a key input for many goods and a commodity that is important for both commercial and personal transportation.

Prof. Morici might well reply that Americans could use the several hundred billion dollars that Americans spend on imported oil to purchase domestically produced energy. True perhaps, but the fact that Americans import the oil suggests that we cannot get a comparable quantity of domestically produced energy for similar prices. So we might well have eliminated Prof. Morici's dreaded "tax on domestic demand" by effectively levying a tax on actual consumption, namely by reducing the amount of energy that Americans actually consume.

It's worth noting, too, that one doesn't just increase domestic energy production by several hundred billion dollars simply by waving a magic wand. The workers and capital necessary for such an increase might well be redirected from other industries thereby reducing their output."