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Comment by epistasis | Hacker News Reader

I guess I'm not seeing anything tying the trade deficit to the destruction of unions, to the massive reduction in top tax rates resulting in higher CEO compensation, etc.

The piece puts increasing trade deficits next to lots of stuff about increasing inequality, but it does not make the case that trade deficits are the cause of increasing inequality.

There's a person that had a job making physical things, but they are not inherently a "person that only makes physical things." The idea that bringing back the making of physical things will make these people wealthier is, well, suspicious. Unions? Better taxations systems? Modernizing manufacturing so that each worker is far more productive and we can compete with the world? That may help. But reducing trade deficits will not fix any of the K shaped economy.

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A current account deficit is a capital account surplus.

We can pay for imports with things we make or things we own. To a first approximation, making things employs people and owning things does not. If we pay with things we make, our economy employs people. If we pay with things we own, the jobs disappear while stocks/bonds/real estate soar.

If you want the whole story from an actual economist, read "Trade Wars are Class Wars" by Klein and Pettis.

You're missing the third thing we pay with: T-bills. We literally print money. That's it. We didn't give up anything we own. We didn't give up anything we made. We printed money, because there needs to be enough currency to represent the ever growing wealth of the world and the world has chosen the US dollar as the reserve currency, to the great benefit of the US.

You're missing that the T-bills are replacing exports (including services) that would otherwise have had to happen to support the imports, and that the latter employs people while the former doesn't.

The benefit is to the US in aggregate but is a detriment to most US citizens, since most US citizens get their money primarily from working rather than from owning assets. But for the minority of people who mostly get their money from owning assets, this is brilliant, I agree.

> Modernizing manufacturing so that each worker is far more productive and we can compete with the world

How does this not correspond directly to reduced trade deficits? In this scenario the US is either sourcing more of what it needs internally, and thereby importing less, or it is more competitive globally and therefore exporting more, or both.

That would be a necessary condition for manufacturing-based reduction of inequality.

But manufacturing is not a way to decrease inequality unless there's massive massive other sorts of changes going with it.

In fact destroying the higher paying jobs to replace them with lower paying jobs in the US will heighten the inequality. And that's what's happening right now.

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