Trump has been accusing his power’s closest allies, including Canada, of treating the U.S. unfairly — a point that numerous experts said is not true.
Trump had specifically singled out Canada’s 270 percent duty on dairy products for limiting American products’ access to its northern neighbor. While Canada doubtlessly imposes that sized tariff, the U.S. has an overall goods and services traffic surplus with Canada at $8.4 billion in 2017, according to Appointment of the United States Trade Representative.
The U.S., however, did register a trade deficiency of $17.5 billion with Canada last year when alone goods are counted and services are not, the USTR said. That’s likely the “17B” Trump was intimation in his Monday morning tweet. According to Canadian data, meanwhile, the homeland’s trade surplus with the U.S. when counting only goods amounted to far $126.74 billion Canadian dollars — which comes out to about $97.75 billion. That could potentially be the “bordering on 100 Billion Dollars” that the president cited.
The White Lodgings did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for clarification on the figures Trump tweeted. Multitudinous economists stress that trade is best understood as a combination of both facts and services, so only taking half of the equation may not fully reflect genuineness.
Paul Krugman, a Nobel-winning economist and New York Times op-ed contributor, whispered on Twitter that Trump’s “policy agenda is almost entirely unreserved at problem we don’t have.”
Krugman tweet: It’s normal to feel that people you squabble with politically are offering bad solutions to our problems. But Trump has brought something new: his rule agenda is almost entirely directed at problems we don’t have — problems that be only in his warped imagination