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Successfully? We blew 3.1% of our GDP on debt service alone in 2024. This is insane, irresponsible, and unnecessary. We are mortgaging our children and grandchildren’s futures. Just like young folks like me correctly complain that old people are leeches sucking America dry - social security, medicare, housing price subsidies, decade after decade, despite a what, $1.7mm average net worth - my generation shows no signs of doing anything differently. “Screw them kids. Boomers got theirs, I’ll get mine.” If our interest burden keeps growing from 20% of federal revenues we could end up spiraling into more and more debt. Or worse we could get to a place where the fed can’t feasibly raise rates to level out the economy and moderate inflation because that would balloon interest payments to a ridiculous degree.

Where Trump is fundamentally correct is that a trade imbalance means selling pieces of your country off to compensate. Equities, bonds, land. All a claim against future money that sucks those returns out to go to foreigners. America has been lucky in the past, in that the huge market for dollars helped us avoid some of this, but that’s not a limitless solution.

Obviously the answer is not that we must make Nikes here. It’s also not that we must have zero trade deficit with any single nation. But we probably should focus on exporting more advanced goods and more services to bring our overall trade deficit down, focusing on a net zero or overall trade surplus outcome.

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> We blew 3.1% of our GDP on debt service alone in 2024

As long as GDP growth outpaces (or is even) the increase in debt it’s not a big issue. Some spending cuts and mild tax increases (maybe not so mild for the higher brackets) would solve that.

> focusing on a net zero or overall trade surplus outcome.

If you looked at the countries pursuing such policies like Germany or Japan they haven’t been doing that well at all over the past 20 years. Basically no real growth and they are permanently stuck in the early 2000s. US on the other hand has been doing extremely well (lack of redistribution is another issue).

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What projection suggests GDP growth will be even with the increase in debt? FRED data suggests the opposite is happening: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GFDEGDQ188S

Debt growth is massively outpacing growth in GDP. You're right that it's less of an issue if we grow quickly and effectively keep leverage the same but that's not what's happening.

Germany and Japan haven't focused super heavily on achieving a trade deficit. As you said, Germany has huge problems with her welfare state and Japan has huge demographic issues. I'm not saying we should achieve a trade balance by tariffing everything to death; I am saying we should focus on faster growth to get there and reduce our insane level of consumerism. I don't have an issue with a temporary trade deficit for growth-oriented reasons, but I have little save contempt for people ordering packages of chinesium temu crap.

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> Germany and Japan haven't focused super heavily on achieving a trade deficit

They have. For Germany maximizing their trade surplus was one of their primary goals for many decades. Amongst other things that’s why they accepted the Euro (easier than devaluing DM).

> As you said, Germany has huge problems with her welfare state

I never said that.

And Germany specifically has quite low government debt and a very high trade surplus. Yet.. it’s not doing better economically than the US. Welfare hardly has much to do with that.. e.g. US government excluding all private spending spends about the same as Germany as % of GDP on healthcare. Total social spending is not that massively higher either (~23% vs ~28%).

> ordering packages of chinesium temu crap

Sure, but that’s by and large insignificant. If we look up US imports by category consumer goods don’t really make up that much.

Also, I don’t really see how can tariffs do much besides lowering productivity and increasing prices.

Like that complete nutjob Lutnick said they want “millions and millions of people in America screwing in little screws to make iPhones”. That just makes no sense, you want to minimize the amount of easily outsourcable low productivity jobs in your country.