Trade deficit figure worth notice, concern

I just finished reading Don Brunell’s column regarding the risk of a trade war with China (“Streamlining regulations helps U.S. compete,” Sequim Gazette, April 18, A-11) and I have to point out a significant error in his letter.

He stated that our trade deficit with China is $50 billion. In reality for 2017 it was $375 billion.

This huge trade deficit that has been accepted over the last 20 plus years had been ignored since it was hoped that the sacrifice that we as a nation was willing to accept would bring China into the Western world’s democratic form of capitalism.

Instead it has gutted our nations factories and the jobs that go along with them and in their place a depressed population of unemployed with little hope but in some cases to turn to drug addiction.

China’s sense of fair competition is to take every advantage legal or illegal over other countries and international companies including intellectual theft and are using their massive trade surplus to build their military, ultimately to challenge the United States.

Add to this threat the unsustainable national debt and annual deficits, our country could be headed for a depression that would make the 1930s look mild.

Consider this: with the current $21 trillion of national debt, the interest that has to be paid increases by $210 billion with just a 1 percent increase across the board on the average interest payable. The Federal Reserve is on track to slowly bring our interest rates out of the lowest, near 0 in our lifetime.

Why, you might say, is this important to me since the interest owed doesn’t show up as a bill to me? If you think that our politicians fight over a billion wait until they have to come up with hundreds of billions just to pay the interest due.

This crowds out money that could be spent on everything else. Not that long ago many people can remember getting 6 percent in a money market account.

If that was to return it would be many hundreds of billions more interest due on the debt. Lets hope that this wonderful country we call home where ever you may live can have our politicians come together and get our out of control spending reined in and our massive trade deficits to something fair instead of free!

Bill Ring

Mission Viejo, Calif.