The US has had a trade deficit since 1975, so is the US trade deficit really such a bad thing?
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This isn’t really a ELI5 answer, but…
An important point a lot of replies are missing is that it can be very difficult to measure some of the most exported products coming from the US. Certain things like services are difficult to measure in the figures typically used by economists. This is the reason every year the worldwide import value is greater than the worldwide export value in reports from organizations like the World Trade Organization. If their data was perfect those amounts should always be equal, unless we were importing products from space aliens.
While the US has a huge trade deficit for physical goods like manufactured products, minerals, etc it’s the largest exporter in the world of less tangible products like engineering, software, product design, ideas, etc. The latter is difficult to measure. For example an iPhone made in China and sold in Europe isn’t an export of the US, but still ultimately contributes to the profits of a US company and thus the US economy because Apple designed iPhone. This isn’t a perfect example but helps convey the idea of problem economists face when measuring US exports. This helps explain why the total value of exports for an economy like the US that focuses primarily on “service” products can be difficult for economists to accurately measure.
This is not to say the US doesn’t have a trade deficit, but the trade deficit numbers used don’t paint the full picture and are very likely reported as larger than they are in reality.
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