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When you buy goods from one country and that country does not buy goods from you that is a trade deficit. Sure in the domestic side the importer makes a profit on the resale of said goods. But the movement of wealth from one country to another without a back flow of trade to balance the deficit causes the importing country to become in debt to the exporting country. Do you thunk that this debt will have no impact on importing countries currency?

But the movement of wealth from one country to another without a back flow of trade to balance the deficit causes the importing country to become in debt to the exporting country.

This is your first mistake. You act like the dollars spent is wealth but the goods received are not wealth. What if the deficit was caused by dollars buying gold. Would you still call that a one way movement of wealth? What if it was dollars buying oil? Or dollars buying factories or shares of stock?

And all our buying doesn't put us into debt. We send them dollars and they send us goods. They have dollars, not IOUs. They then need to either buy our goods, buy US bonds, buy US stocks or stuff the dollars under their pillows. Tell us why any or all of these options are bad for America?

Are you in debt to your grocer?

I doubt you have a bilateral money surplus with him.

But it does not mean he has lent you money. It means you have spent at his store money you already earned. And that you got groceries for it. He is not richer by the amount you paid him, because he gave you groceries in return for your money. He may be richer by the amount of the difference, his total cost of getting you the groceries, and what you paid. You are better off to the extent you willingly gave up your money for groceries because you needed or wanted the groceries more than you needed or wanted the money you exchanged for them.

US citizens earn $12 trillion a year, about. If we spend some of it abroad rather than here, it does not make us poorer. Any more than you are made poorer by spending what you've earned at your grocer, instead of only buying carrots from your sister in law.

There are perfectly good reasons to dislike running trade deficits as large as ours in our present circumstances, or more exactly, to take it as indicating certain policies are unsound. But you haven't mentioned one of them yet, that is based on any real economic fact or effect. There are perfectly good reasons to oppose certain forms of trade we are currently engaged in. Not because it makes us poorer - it doesn't, it enriches us - but because trade benefits both parties, and some irresponsible parties it is not safe to benefit. Strategically, not economically.

There are reasonable arguments well informed people can and do have about trade. But this so far isn't one of them, because one party to it is laboring under the delusion that trade deficits mean we are "losing money" or signal that we are becoming poorer somehow, when they simply have no such meaning, and it is not what they measure.