You’re right about trade needing much more thought/discussion.
Our trade imbalance can’t be solved easily. One problem for the US is we have a high standard of living and yet we must now compete with hard-working low-standard-of-living people in the rest of the world.
Something has to give and unfortunately, we’re outnumbered and outworked by more desperate people in the world to the point where Trump’s seat of the pants trade-barrier ideas won’t work. What’ll have to give is the US standard of living (e.g. wages) will have to drop. So many Americans are spoiled. Unless we work smarter and continually invent new productivity tools in the fight against cheap labor, we’re sunk.
One thing that's causing us trouble with trade is our high debt. To pay for our debt, we must continually borrow money from China, Japan and elsewhere.
So rather than spend their money on hard goods and services, the Chinese and Japanese spend the dollars they earn from trade, not on employing Americans in industry, but to pay for our growing debt.
This is one of the economy killers that Obama and Bush brought us. The deeper we sink in national debt, the tougher it is to get other countries to buy our goods and services. It's a vicious circle.
One other thing that's crucial is getting rid of harmful regulations. I believe most grown needs to occur in small to medium sized businesses -- essentially Main Street not Wall Street. But if the structure of our economy is unfriendly to entrepreneurs, we can't grow the jobs we need. It's another reason I love voting for Trump -- he's an entrepreneur par excellence who know what regulations are doing the most harm.
So what are the trade/economy subjects we need to discuss? I track markets for software in the telecom industry, so certainly the long range effect on low wage IT workers is a subject I plan to start a vanity on.
Please do the same, AlanGreenSpam. Ping me, and let's get the discussion going. I'm sick of commenting on the daily Trump hit pieces from National Review and the rest :- )