The Fulcrum strives to approach news stories with an open mind and skepticism, striving to present our readers with a broad spectrum of viewpoints through diligent research and critical thinking. As best we can, remove personal bias from our reporting and seek a variety of perspectives in both our news gathering and selection of opinion pieces.
However, before our readers can analyze varying viewpoints, they must have the facts.
This week's news is dominated by the extensive tariffs imposed by the Trump Administration. This writing presents our readers with just the facts on tariffs.
QUESTION: What are the advantages of a trade deficit for the United States
Interestingly enough, a trade deficit, while often seen in a negative light, can have some advantages for the United States. Here are a few key points to consider:
- Access to a Variety of Goods: The trade deficit allows the U.S. to import various goods worldwide. This means consumers can access products that might not be produced domestically, increasing their choices and potentially lowering prices due to competition.
- Foreign Investment: A trade deficit can attract foreign investment. When other countries hold U.S. dollars from exports, they often reinvest that money into the U.S. economy, including stocks, real estate, and other assets. This can help fuel economic growth and job creation.
- Specialization and Efficiency: By importing goods that can be produced more efficiently abroad, the U.S. can focus on producing goods and services where it has a comparative advantage. This specialization can lead to more efficient use of resources and higher overall productivity.
- Consumer Benefits: The availability of cheaper imported goods can lead to lower prices for consumers, increasing their purchasing power and overall standard of living.
Of course, a trade deficit has its downsides and potential risks, but the aforementioned are some of the benefits that can arise. It's a complex economic topic with many facets to consider.
QUESTION: What are the disadvantages of a trade deficit for the United States
A trade deficit can have several disadvantages for the United States:
- Job Losses: When the U.S. imports more than it exports, domestic industries may struggle to compete with cheaper foreign goods, potentially leading to job losses in certain sectors.
- Increased Borrowing: To finance a trade deficit, the U.S. may need to borrow from foreign lenders, increasing national debt and potentially affecting financial stability.
- Currency Depreciation: Persistent trade deficits can lead to a weaker U.S. dollar, making imports more expensive and potentially causing inflation.
- Economic Dependency: Relying heavily on imports can make the U.S. economy vulnerable to supply chain disruptions and changes in global market conditions.
- Trade Tensions: Large trade deficits can lead to trade tensions and disputes with trading partners, as seen with the U.S.-China trade relationship.
While trade deficits are not inherently bad and can sometimes indicate a strong economy, the disadvantages listed highlight the importance of managing trade imbalances effectively.
QUESTION: Did the overall United States trade deficit increase or decrease during President Trump's first term in office?
During President Trump's first term in office, the U.S. trade deficit increased. Despite his administration's efforts to reduce the trade deficit through tariffs and other measures, the overall trade deficit grew. In 2016, the year before Trump took office, the trade deficit was around $481 billion. By 2020, it had risen to approximately $679 billion. This is roughly a 41% increase.
The tariffs imposed on imports from countries like China, Canada, and Mexico did reduce the trade deficit with China specifically, but overall, the trade deficit with other countries increased.
It's a complex issue influenced by various economic factors beyond just trade policies.
QUESTION: Has the overall United States trade deficit increased or decreased in the last 4 years?
The U.S. trade deficit has increased over the last four years.
Here's a brief overview:
- 2020: The trade deficit was $-626.39 billion.
- 2021: It increased to $-858.24 billion.
- 2022: The deficit rose further to $-971.12 billion.
- 2023: The trade deficit continued to grow, reaching $-1,030 billion. Up 31%
This is roughly a 64% increase.
The trade deficit has been widening due to a combination of factors, including increased imports and relatively slower export growth.
QUESTION: Does the United States gain or lose jobs because of the trade deficit with China?
The trade deficit with China has generally resulted in job losses in the United States. According to a report by the Economic Policy Institute, the growing trade deficit with China between 2001 and 2018 led to the loss of approximately 3.7 million U.S. jobs. The majority of these job losses were in the manufacturing sector, which accounted for about 2.8 million jobs.
The report highlights that imports from China have displaced goods that would have otherwise been produced domestically, leading to job displacement across various states and industries. While there are some jobs created through exports to China, they have not been enough to offset the jobs lost due to imports.
It's a complex issue with significant economic and social implications.
QUESTION: Did the trade deficit with China go up during Trump's first term and down during Biden's term?
During Trump's first term, the trade deficit with China initially increased, peaking at around $419 billion in 2018. However, it did decrease towards the end of his term, reaching approximately $311 billion in 20201.
Under Biden's administration, the trade deficit with China continued to decrease, reaching its lowest level since 2010. By 2023, the deficit had dropped to around $279 billion.
So, yes, the trade deficit with China increased during Trump's first term and then decreased during Biden's term.
QUESTION: Did the trade deficit with Canada increase more under the Trump administration than the Biden Administration?
As shown below the trade deficits with Canada increased significantly under the Biden Administration and went down under the Trump Administration: (shown in billions)
- 2017-17.5 2018- 19.8 2019- 27.4 2020: $15.2 billion 2021: $50.2 2023: $78.19 2024: $63.3 billion
The significant increase in the U.S. trade deficit with Canada from 2020 to 2021 was primarily driven by a surge in imports of energy-related products, particularly crude oil. In 2021, U.S. imports from Canada in this category rose by 74.8%, reflecting higher global energy prices and increased demand as economies recovered from the pandemic. This contributed to a increase in the trade deficit between the two countries of over 200%
QUESTION: Did the trade deficit increase with Mexico more under the Trump Administration or the Biden Administration?
The trade deficit with Mexico increased more significantly under the Trump administration than under the Biden administration. During Trump's term, the deficit rose from approximately $63.2 billion in 2017 to about $112.8 billion in 2020. Under Biden's administration, the deficit increased from around $110.0 billion in 2021 to about $118.0 billion in 2024. So, the increase was more pronounced during Trump's term.
And that's just the facts. We look now to subject matter experts to follow up with many opinion writings that use solutions journalism guidelines we ascribe to in exploring:
- What's dividing us on this issue?
- How do we decide which information to trust?
- What is oversimplified about this issue?
- What are the nuances and complexities of this issue?
- Is there any part of the other side's position that makes sense?
- What do you want the other side to understand about you, and what do you want to understand about the other side?
- What's the question nobody's asking?
- Explore the nuances and complexities of the issue.
David Nevins is co-publisher of The Fulcrum and co-founder and board chairman of the Bridge Alliance Education Fund.
All data and information were obtained from Copilot, an AI-powered chatbot owned and operated by Microsoft Corporation.
Children watch a July Fourth Parade along the Walkway of Heroes and Independence Avenue on July 04, 2026 in Tappan, New York.
The Great American Grumpfest
Our nation’s 250th birthday party didn’t feel especially patriotic and wasn’t as much fun as the 200th anniversary was.
President Trump, who did his best to co-opt our holiday for his personal aggrandizement, was a major reason. The party he threw in Washington, D.C., was crankier than uplifting, and less about celebrating our shared past and a promising future than about reminding us how far we have strayed from our founders’ plan to create a republic that future Americans would keep in good working order.
Credit Trump this much. He has a singular gift for picking at scabs that other politicians would rather ignore and pushing us into reckonings we don’t need.
The thing is, Americans have seen all this before. Sometimes the makeover we were encouraged to undertake was more conservative, sometimes more liberal. Whatever direction we were pushing, however, the reckoning we had in mind this time had to be more forthright and the conclusion more definitive than it was the last time.
Our current discontents, the ones behind the reckoning President Trump has been trying to inspire, are not trivial. Included among them are immigration, birthright citizenship, exploding healthcare costs, election rigging, a gag-inducing national debt, how we educate our children, too many genders, racial differences we can’t move past, a lopsided economy that favors more well-off Americans, and historic levels of political corruption and graft. Add to these the several foreign adventures he has pushed us into or is anxious to undertake, and you have the makings of a national headache the likes of which we haven’t had in half a century.
All the elbow-throwing and overheated rhetoric we’re using today have begun to look almost normal in all the ways that bickering neighbors and feuding family members appear normal. But they have also made us look mean-spirited and have portrayed our differences as irreconcilable. To ourselves, of course, but also to many people outside the United States who might be forgiven for turning their heads and not looking at the national car wreck we Americans show no interest in avoiding.
The good news, as I suggested above, is that Americans have had a great deal of practice dealing with challenges and national car wrecks like these.
This essay begins to lay out the reasons why.
By way of illustration, we have our seemingly insatiable demand for more bad news about race in America.
Sixty years after being released from the legal constrictions that bedeviled both white and black Americans, many white people have come to believe the color that used to make them unassailable is now a sign of a moral inferiority born of a racial animus they can never wash off. Many black people, on the other hand, are insisting that America is as hopelessly stacked against them as the formerly unassailable white people’s ancestors used to tell their black ones.
The result is that many people today are buying into racist nightmares and mumbo jumbo that their black and white ancestors worked hard and effectively to put in each other’s heads.
This might be dismissed as crazy behavior if it weren’t so important to rituals Americans have long used to express their deepest fears about each other while figuring out what move they can make that won’t end with their world crashing down on everybody’s head.
Unfortunately, the kind of cultural sleight of hand we have used to ramp up our racial differences has been appropriated by people who have many other cultural fears and unresolved differences with each other. Their clumsy but culturally prescribed missteps are making all these other issues look as irremediable as our racial problems.
A good place to start an answer to how we back away from ledges is Alexis de Tocqueville’s writing on early-19th-century American democracy. He had an optimistic take on Americans’ unscripted displays of public bravado, recrimination, and payback.
For him, these were occasions when people tried to mitigate the effects of the unfair hand they were dealing someone else or had themselves been dealt by behaving in ways quite at odds with how they would otherwise be expected to act. These inversions of what Tocqueville called “the natural order of conscience” presented themselves as a loud but culturally muted challenge to the hypocrisies that people had built into the world they’d made together.
One of his favorite illustrations of early-American hypocrisy involved slave masters sleeping with their less-than-worthy slaves. To the best of my knowledge, he didn’t pick up on all the ways that slaves messed with their owners. Their well-chronicled and quiet resistance showed that even severely ill-treated people can exercise more control over their lives than outsiders appreciate.
Be that as it may, such inversions of a people’s “natural order of conscience” make a good public show of them wrestling with demons they can’t or may not want to shake off, but in any case, are nowhere close to figuring out how to cast out.
Implicit in these disruptions was the discomforting idea that people might flip the entire script and turn the world on its head in more permanent ways. That kind of flipping worked out better for us in our revolution against England than in our Civil War. These events taught us the value of stepping back from historically unprecedented ledges.
Americans of late have been giving loud expression to a long list of things they don’t like about each other and the last makeover they started but didn’t finish a half-century ago. The outcome of our fights today will be as revealing as they are embarrassing to everyone who imagined they could recast our country in a way that privileged their favorite kind of Americans.
Their disappointment with the accommodations they strike will be palpable, but the middling results they achieve with all their pushing and shoving won’t be anything they can’t live with.
Anthropologists who have written about such moments in other cultures less “advanced” than our own show that people find ways to work around their seemingly irreconcilable differences without ever fully resolving them. Indeed, the patches and repairs people make have the unheralded effect of reinforcing rather than undermining the legitimacy of the practices and values they thought were fundamentally flawed.
For example…
White guilt and black pessimism do more good than putting cash into the pockets of professional shamers and handwringers. They give the rest of us who don’t feel guilty or powerless more time to make the world less racially unequal. Good news.
Regarding illegal immigration, the entrance requirements for future immigrants will remain stringent. Americans will applaud the continued detention and deportation of the few illegal immigrants who commit serious crimes. Good news.
All the people who came to the United States without being legally vetted and were locked up for a time will be released in numbers small enough to avoid serious media attention. Along with the several million other good people who snuck in but avoided capture, the former detainees will go to school, find gainful employment, pay their taxes, and stay out of trouble. Many will eventually become citizens. Good news.
Investigations into election tampering and Donald Trump’s 2020 presidential loss will come to an unceremonious conclusion the day after his second term ends. Many Americans will grumble about this, but there will also be some quiet partying, too. Good and bad news.
Congressional hearings into all the grifting accomplished by people tied to the Trump administration will end without anyone having to pay a dime back to the American taxpayers. Bad news, we’ll learn to live with.
New laws and regulations will be created in the hope that the kind of corruption practiced by President Trump will not be repeated for another 250 years. Good news, I hope we’ll live long enough to enjoy.
Show trials for people who allegedly vandalized the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, if they happen, will get big television viewer ratings. Good news.
Trials for pardoned Capitol insurrectionists who committed serious crimes after their release should get more attention, but won’t. Bad news.
We will continue to hear nothing from most of the people who were pardoned for crimes they committed in the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. They will keep their mouths shut and their heads down for the rest of their life. Good news.
The gold-gilded ornaments that Donald Trump had plastered all over the White House will be shipped to Mar-a-Lago, where the former president will sell them on eBay. Fun news.
American taxpayers end up paying for most of the new East Wing, the removal of the miniature gladiatorial arena that was built behind the White House, and the restoration of the White House rose garden. Bad news.
The Triumphal Arch was never built. Good news.
Trad wives and gay couples raise perfectly lovely children. Good but unsurprising news.
Trans men and women learn that most Americans can’t figure out who they used to be. No one gives a second thought to their use of “family bathrooms” or “unisex bathrooms” in public settings, businesses, and schools. Communities will sponsor athletic teams that have trans boys and girls just to show they can. Good news.
Budget deficits will be kicked down the road for someone else’s children to pay down. Bad news.
Federal agencies that had their budgets and employee ranks slashed during President Trump’s second term are getting some of the money and lost positions back. Good news.
Elite universities will buy their way out of DEI purgatory by competing for conservative scholars whose inflated salaries dwarf those of their liberal colleagues, who will think about suing their institutions for reverse discrimination but won’t be able to figure out who would pay for it or care. More fun news.
Okay. I’ve probably missed some ways that Americans will step back from the ledges they have been making noises about leaping off. But to the extent that my predictions pan out, the best and most important moral of the stories about us stepping away is this: everything we lost and took back, or had returned to us, will have happened without our government collapsing, civic traditions crumbling, or our people beating each other up.
The reason why is that the differences Americans have with each other really weren’t as irreconcilable as we made them out to be. The empty-sounding bromide that Americans have more that unites us than divides us turns out to be true, not just metaphorically but in fact.
Now that is really something to celebrate.
Daniel J. Monti (danieljmonti.com) is Professor of Sociology at Saint Louis University and the author of American Democracy and Disconsent: Liberalism and Illiberalism in Ferguson, Charlottesville, Black Lives Matter, and the Capitol Insurrection.