I own a small dessert business. My business has a 100% trade deficit with the grocery store. I’m always buying from them, and they’ve never once bought anything from me. Now, of course, I take products I buy from the grocery store, turn them into delicious baked goods, and make a 50%+ profit, while the grocery store is running on 2-4% profit margins, but WE HAVE A TRADE DEFICIT! They’re ripping me off with their low, low prices, because they NEVER buy anything from me! Of course, the alternative is for me to grow, harvest, thrash, grind, then finely mill all of my own flour, including into the various mixes of flour that I use for various products (cake flour, bread flour, all-purpose, etc…), maintain and milk a dairy cow, churn my own butter, make that milk into heavy cream, yogurt, sour cream, condensed milk, and evaporated milk, etc…grow cacao, and then turn into all the different kinds of chocolate and baking cocoa… grow and harvest sugar cane, sorghum, mine salt, make baking powder, baking soda, grow vanilla beans, etc, etc, etc… All of that (plus WAY more), and we haven’t even talked about all the different fruits and nuts I would need, or how I would only be able to offer certain products during certain times of the year, or how a lot of what I said before wouldn’t even be possible in the climate I live in, but I digress. If all of that wasn’t cost-prohibitive enough to completely wipe out my profits (it would be, and then some), the time commitment and significant additional physical labor certainly wouldn’t make any of it worth the tiny remaining profit. Now, compare that to the current screeching about the trade deficits we have with other countries. We import raw materials (aluminum, steel, lumber, etc…) from other countries, which would be labor and/or cost prohibitive for us to make, or that we simply cannot produce or source here, and then we take those materials, and turn them into higher profit margin products, which we then export to other countries. It is exactly the same as my example, but on a macro scale.