The U.S. international trade deficit exploded from $845.0 billion in 2021 to $945.3 billion in 2022, as imports increased more than exports, the Bureau of Economic Analysis of the U.S. Department of Commerce reported in a revised report released in March. This is the largest trade deficit in American history, and the largest trade deficit in the history of the world.
It reflects what Lyndon LaRouche termed the “importer of last resort,” the U.S. addiction to imports, to compensate for America’s physical economy’s inability to produce the goods needed for its population’s physical existence. In a Dec. 23, 2000 EIR article, published in its Jan. 19, 2001 issue, entitled, “The Demise of the Importer of Last Resort,” LaRouche wrote:
“Look at what is called U.S. production. How much of the nominal U.S. production output’s content is the resale of imported components, assemblies, and even entire products? Compare the country of origin of your clothing, and nearly everything else, by type, which you wore or used otherwise two decades ago, and the country of origin of the same or a similar product today. Look at the resort to virtual slave-labor operations, abroad, to export productive employment from the United States (and also western Europe) into regions where the price of labor is relatively the cheapest, and relative skills most marginal.” (https://larouchepub.com/lar/2001/2803_demise_importer.html)
