You can see here that the trend line for imports is consistent for the past 4 years: https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/imports https://tradingeconomics

You can see here that the trend line for imports is consistent for the past 4 years: https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/imports https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/imports So you could say that it’s the deficit (e.g. the big tax cut from 4 years ago) that precipitated to this. My point is that “stimulus equals problems at the ports” is likely an overly simplistic answer.