During the 2016 presidential campaign, candidate Donald Trump often complained about the large and growing U.S. trade deficit with China. It was, he asserted, clear proof that the U.S. was being taken for a ride by one of its most important trading partners. Since his surprising election victory, President Trump’s trade policies seem to revolve around the assumption that trade deficits are bad by definition and that his administration should do everything possible to eliminate them with every country that trades with the U.S. The largest U.S. trade deficit is with China, which the U.S. Census Bureau indicates was a huge $344 billion in 2017 or almost four times larger than the value of U.S. exports to that country. China counts the de...

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