[mpweiher]

Just in 2017, the US had a $64 billion trade deficit with Germany. 2016 was pretty much the same, and as I said, it's been like that for a long, long time.

And no, that's not by dumping cheap products due to low labor costs. Labor costs in the industrial sector tend to be quite a bit higher in Germany, strong unions and labor protection and all that awful "socialist" stuff.

The surplus is because German products are high quality and are in demand. In fact, most of the top categories of exports are the same for the US and Germany, so it's a pretty direct competition.

Overall, the US trade deficit was $478 billion in 2016. Recently, Germany had a trade surplus with China, despite the much lower Chinese wages.

The US current accounts deficit is very similar in scale, at $462 billion in 2017. That's the difference between the amount that the US (private+public) borrowed from foreign countries and the amount that foreign countries borrowed from the US.

[holydude]

[flagged]

[mpweiher]

LOL. You have to threaten tariffs when you can't compete.

And yes, unlike you, I do know how borrowing money works: the US is currently borrowing half a trillion dollars per year from foreign sources, net.

[dang]

Would you please stop using HN for flamewars? It's totally not ok, and you've done it a lot and we've had to warn you about it repeatedly. You've posted many awesome things to Hacker News so we'd hate to ban you, but protecting the site from flames is more important. This is a problem we need you to fix.

Please read and follow https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and help take care of this place instead of helping to wreck it. I'm sure you wouldn't fuel flames in a forest or a garden, so please don't fuel them here.

[mpweiher]

Sorry, I don't "use" HN for flamewars. And just to be sure I checked several pages worth of my comments just now, after all I could be misremembering.

I also don't recall being "warned" about this "repeatedly".

I do try to correct gross misinformation. With facts and figures.

[dang]

The most recent moderation reply is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16288896. If it doesn't read like a warning, that's out of politeness and respect for your positive contributions to HN.

It's true that your most recent history doesn't contain ideological flamewar (not counting this nationalistic spat), which is great. Nonetheless it has noticeably been a problem in the past, and your comments still sometimes contain uncivil swipes that need to be edited out.