Brad Setser: "If you just look at the export side of our economy, we’ve been waning as a trading power for a long time. That’s not solvable just through the Trump trade policies. It takes changes in tax and changes in our exchange rates. But the amount we export as a country is roughly at the same level, in proportion to our economy, as it was in the 1980s. So we haven’t been an exporting power for a long time. And exports as a share of U.S. GDP have basically been trending down for the past 10 years, not because of Trump’s trade policies in his term, but primarily because the dollar’s been pretty strong and because
we have a tax policy that penalizes companies that export from the U.S. So they can achieve much lower tax rates by putting their intellectual property outside of the U.S. We encourage companies not to produce in the U.S. and instead to produce abroad and just to book offshore profits. So there’s a set of policies that have made the U.S. a very weak exporting power. I think we have to be honest with ourselves. That is a real problem. It’s not because of unfair trade practices abroad."