Originally published at NBC News with my quote below.

​President Donald Trump has repeatedly criticized the nation’s trade deficit, which the Commerce Department reported Wednesday reached a new record high. 
​
But the same Commerce report showed the value of American exports had also hit a new record, indicating there’s still strong demand for U.S. goods and services abroad.

A trade deficit simply means a country is importing more than it is exporting. As the Congressional Research Service reported in 2018, Trump’s fixation on reversing the deficit “contrasts with the views of most economists.”
Maintaining a deficit usually says little about the state of a country’s economy. The U.S. trade deficit reflects strong domestic growth and consumption, especially relative to the weaker economic performance seen in many parts of the world, including most other Western developed countries. 

“Trade helps us to be better off,” said Vance Ginn, an economist and adviser in Trump’s first term.  Whether it is sourcing goods that the U.S. no longer produces or which can be produced more cheaply elsewhere, large American import levels reflect strong demand from consumers for stuff — and the U.S. economy as a whole generally benefits from this arrangement, Ginn said.

Countries with large trade surpluses, such as China, Russia and Saudi Arabia, tend to be heavy exporters of natural resources with relatively lower rates of domestic consumption. 
Trump has indicated he may prefer the U.S. to more closely resemble this group of nations. In his executive order last week laying out his new administration’s trade priorities, “investigating the causes of our country’s large and persistent annual trade deficits in goods” was the first item listed. 

Asked what Canada and Mexico needed to do to avoid sweeping new 25% tariffs, Trump said Sunday, “They have to balance out their trade, number one. We have deficits with almost every country — not every country, but almost — and we’re going to change it.”

Because Americans tend to buy more and save less than those ib other countries, a deficit persists. Economists are nearly unanimous that Trump’s call for tariffs to reverse the deficit would raise costs for U.S. consumers — and the president himself recently acknowledged their imposition would likely lead to “pain” for some time.  
  
Trump often cites William McKinley, a former U.S. president who, as a congressman, helped implement massive trade duties, as his lodestar for how he believes the U.S. economy should be run. McKinley was indeed successful in raising large sums of money for the U.S. government several decades before the first national income tax was implemented. 

However, by the time McKinley was sworn in as president in 1897, the country’s transition from an agrarian to an industrialized economy had accelerated, and he ultimately abandoned the use of tariffs in favor of reciprocal trade agreements. 

There may have been a point in the 1980s and 1990s when America’s widening trade deficit began to cause problems again. In testimony before the U.S. Senate in 1998, Robert Scott, an economist with the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, said trade imbalances had likely contributed to 2 million manufacturing job losses between 1979 and 1994, with hundreds of thousands resulting from the 1992 North American Free Trade Agreement alone — a pact Trump repeatedly criticized before replacing it with the United States-Mexico-Canada-Agreement in 2018. His latest volley of tariffs would contravene that very deal, which is up for review in the middle of next year.

Along with the lost jobs was the effect on wages, Scott said. Since 1979, Americans’ inflation-adjusted earnings have risen only by 12%, even as the size of the overall U.S. economy has grown exponentially during the same period. Wealth inequality, too, accelerated during this time.

The Wall Street Journal’s right-leaning editorial board has noted the “contradictions” of Trump’s economic policies. 
“Mr. Trump likes tariffs and wants more of them, but he also wants a weaker dollar to promote U.S. exports, and the two desires are in conflict,” it said this week. 

Most economists, left and right, believe that at this point, it would be extremely difficult to bring back a meaningful number of manufacturing roles — and that those that still exist currently benefit from lower trade barriers and, in some cases, recent federal programs designed to prop up key industries like semiconductor manufacturing. 

“It would be better if Mr. Trump and his crew dropped the strong dollar-weak dollar chatter and focused on a stable dollar,” the Journal’s editorial board wrote. “That’s what inflation-weary Americans elected the President to do.”

​Watch my interview in NTD News on 1/31/2025.

​Don't miss my interview today on NTD News about Nvidia's $600 billion decline in market cap due to increased competition from DeepSeek.

We need more market competition, which will help advance the AI revolution and improve prosperity.

​Despite cooling inflation, consumer sentiment is still low as its impact continues to weigh on households.

Vance Ginn, president of Ginn Economic Consulting and former chief economist of the Office of Management and Budget, spoke to NTD about the future of the American economy in the next four years.

Here's the post by NTD News: https://www.ntd.com/congress-must-act-to-cut-government-spending-economist_1034926.html

Listen here to my interview on The Lars Larson Show. 

Listen here!

On this episode of the podcast, Vance Ginn, former Trump White House economic advisor, dives into the pressing economic challenges facing the new Trump administration and offers solutions rooted in pro-growth policies. Ginn outlines strategies to curb inflation and address the staggering $36 trillion national debt, emphasizing the need to cut government spending, implement tax reform, deregulate industries, and pursue free trade agreements. The former Office of Management and Budget Chief Economist also evaluates the impact of Trump’s plans to impose new tariffs, the effectiveness of Trump-era tax cuts, and the Department of Government Efficiency's role in reducing wasteful spending. Ginn makes a bold case for eliminating the federal minimum wage to foster competition and create new jobs.
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​The U.S. labor market rebounded in November as the economy added 227,000 new jobs, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ monthly report. The economy recovered from the labor strife and economic fallout from two devastating hurricanes, though some of the indicators within the jobs report are mixed. NTD spoke with Vance Ginn, president of Ginn Economic Consulting and the former chief economist at the Office of Management and Budget from 2019–2020 during the previous Trump administration, on December 6, 2024: https://www.ntd.com/former-white-house-economist-skeptical-jobs-news-is-all-positive_1033130.html.

​Don’t miss my interview on NTD News about excessive government spending and how Trump and DOGE could make an impact.

Originally interviewed at KTRH News.

​One of the big items during the Trump whirlwind campaign, was the president-elect's promise to lower prices, and ease inflation. But can we really expect it to happen? And how long will it take?

"I think you will start to see many more of the things that you buy on a daily basis, at least start to stabilize" said Texas based economist, Dr. Vance Ginn, "And that will help out many Americans across the economy."

But how long will it be before we actually see results?

"I don't think it will happen overnight" Ginn told KTRH, "But I would guess that within a couple of months you would start to see some changes within the cost of living across the country."

If you remember, the economy and inflation were at some of the lowest levels in our nation's history during Trump's first term, a term that Dr. Ginn served in the White House's Office of Management and Budget (OMB).

"When the Trump administration starts on January 20th, in the first 100 days there's going to be a lot of cuts in regulations and other things that will reduce the cost of doing business, and then that will also help to reduce prices across the economy" noted Ginn.

Wasteful government spending will also be a key cut. In the meantime, 61% of Americans now say they are living paycheck to paycheck.

Listen to my interview here.

​Write-up on my interview here:

​Young people are still trying to achieve the American dream of purchasing their first home but it's become increasingly more difficult in recent years.

It's not as easy today to buy a home. Many people are living in apartments or townhomes instead of houses and some may also have a roommate or two to save money in an era of higher costs for housing.

Texas-based Economist Vance Ginn calls it more of an American dream instead of the American dream because it's a different dream for everyone and young people are having to scale back their dreams of ending up in a bigger home.

"Folks who are just starting in their careers and trying to find a house have had to downsize those aspirations on how big of a house they can get," he said.

The high housing costs are a result of multiple things happening at the federal level but also at local levels too. Ginn said excessive government spending and the Federal Reserve printing too much money have been a recipe for this disaster.

"There's a lot of local zoning regulations and other things that are hindering the supply of new homes being built," said Ginn. "This has contributed to housing unaffordability across the country."

Former President Donald Trump has also said that government overspending as well as the mass amounts of illegal aliens coming into the country over the last four years have caused the demand for housing and prices to skyrocket. Ginn said that approach of deporting illegal aliens can help the situation but it doesn't fully address the supply issue.

Vice President Kamala Harris has proposed building around three million new homes over the next few years and providing up to $25,000 in down-payment assistance to first-time buyers. Ginn said that would only increase the already high demand and the price of housing even more and the main focus should instead be on reducing inflation and federal spending.

"Cutting government spending and reducing the debt will contribute to less inflation so that people can afford things like housing and food," Ginn said.