Commentary Missing from U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai’s recent statement on the Biden administration’s new U.S. trade policy was any mention of the country’s single most important trade problem—the annual U.S. trade deficit. It will be well over $800 billion by the end of the year, and this will be the 45th consecutive year in which the United States has accumulated a trade deficit. The total of those accumulated deficits is now about $15 trillion, or close to 70 percent of U.S. GDP. It is important to understand that those dollars are not just pieces of paper that just get transferred from America to Europe, or Asia, or elsewhere. They are a claim on American assets and thus a transfer of wealth from America to the governments and citizens of other countries, particularly China. In international accounting, there is a calculation known as national net investment position that shows how …