"Balanced trade" is still just a concept from the Trump fictional universe though, alongside other nonsense like needing physical goods making for a strong barg

"Balanced trade" is still just a concept from the Trump fictional universe though, alongside other nonsense like needing physical goods making for a strong bargaining position. Outside of the fictional universe "balanced trade" means very little, because it doesn't take into account services, imaginary property, or our special ability to trade away long-term IOUs in a currency that we can arbitrarily devalue when need be. I do completely agree with the foundation of the argument that our privileged position as the world reserve currency has been used to hollow out our industrial base, put the screws to labor, and gut the distributed main street economy. But if you want to right the ship you have to get "up" correct first, and the Trump fictional universe definition of "up" is very obviously not correct. Actually achieving this specious metric of "balanced trade" would mean basically destroying the economy we do have. So this administration claiming this as their metric of success means it's very hard to tell if/when they will/would abandon it to pull out of a death spiral.