

Putting on my best swiss cheese brain, maybe they are treating it ‘like a business’ and trying to do debt to income ratio? So our deficit is the debt then they look at tariffs on the imported goods as the income.
Do you know if this holds for other countries too?
Absolutely, but if one has no idea what they are talking about, they might massive brain worms about the US debt and it being caused by our budget deficit. Then they look at all these other countries and learn about the ‘deficit’ we have with them and that’s the same word, same thing, ezpz. Now you simple get a solid 50% debt to income ratio by dividing the two and cutting it in half, check mate economists.