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Jared Golden of Lewiston represents Maine’s 2nd Congressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives.
This piece was originally published on February 25 in “ Dear Mainer,” Golden’s Substack. It is reposted here in its entirety, with permission.
Last week, the Supreme Court struck down the majority of President Donald Trump’s tariffs, saying the president had wrongly claimed the authority to impose tariffs under the International Economic Emergency Powers Act.
The president and his administration are already seeking other authorities to re-impose the tariffs. Some of those authorities will ultimately require congressional approval. Others are, by their nature, much narrower and more targeted than the authority the president had tried to claim under IEEPA.
My position remains that Congress should get some skin in the game and craft a tariff regime that serves American workers and industries.
This development comes just weeks after China announced a world record-shattering trade surplus. These two developments should put America’s own trade imbalance back at center stage. So I’m using this month’s “Dear Mainer” to dig into my thinking about our international balance sheet.
In an uncertain world, our ballooning trade deficit has sent valuable American assets abroad while increasing our dependency on other countries. That’s dangerous for our security, prosperity, and ability to control our own future.
Selling the farm while increasing the mortgage
The U.S. is buying nearly a trillion dollars more in goods from other countries than it sells back to them. Adjusted for 2025 inflation, America went from a roughly $65 billion trade surplus in 1975 to a $918 billion deficit by the end of 2024.
There are only two ways to sustain that status quo: selling off American assets — everything from existing business and infrastructure to land and stocks in American companies — or by borrowing from the rest of the world.
We have done both, for decades. We’ve sold the farm even as we’ve sought a bigger and bigger mortgage.
Foreign countries now have a much larger influence on the decisions America needs to make about our country and our economy. Those decisions should be made solely based on how they benefit Americans — not anyone else.
The price of ‘foreign investment’
The sale of American assets to foreign countries or foreign-owned entities is often described by free trade proponents as “foreign investment.” But we should be clear-eyed about what’s really happening. In most cases, this is not investment in new jobs through the creation of new business. Instead, it’s often a simple transfer of existing domestic assets to foreign owners.
Consider Maine’s energy transmission infrastructure. Over the years, Central Maine Power was purchased by a Spanish energy corporation. Versant, formerly Bangor Hydro, is now owned, ultimately, by the City of Calgary in Canada. In one generation, our state’s entire energy infrastructure has shifted to foreign hands.
In other cases, foreign “investors” may purchase preexisting properties that are vacant or underutilized. But the end result is the same: The fate of an asset with many potential uses is now in foreign hands instead of the community’s.
Similar dynamics are taking place in agriculture and the financial sector. Foreign ownership of U.S. farmland is rapidly rising. It’s increased 85 percent in the past 15 years. The stock market — already a game primarily for the wealthiest Americans — is now increasingly a game for foreign entities, which currently own roughly 40 percent of U.S. corporate equity. For perspective, non-American entities own $27 trillion more of our assets than we own of theirs.
Foreign ownership means foreign control. Our addiction to buying more goods than we sell on the world stage has foreign-owned entities taking more and more pieces of the American prosperity pie.
More IOUs, more problems
We also finance our trade deficit by simply borrowing money from other countries through their ownership of U.S. Treasury bonds and other assets. But our rapidly accumulating pile of IOUs is starting to scare our trading partners.
America’s credit rating was downgraded twice last year. In January, Denmark announced its intention to sell its U.S. treasury bonds.
America’s finances are on shakier footing, and the world understands that threatening the U.S. over the debt is a way to extract policy concessions. If both trends continue, interest rates will rise, making it more expensive to borrow money, which makes it harder for working people to ever afford things like homes that have traditionally helped them build wealth.
Giving any country (especially China) the power to worsen those problems is a threat to our economy and national security.
Reclaiming our prosperity, and our future
Like most parents, I want my daughters to have it better than I did. But I fear the structural problems in our trade system are effectively shipping off their future wealth to finance our current consumption. And they’ll be left paying the debt — literally and figuratively.
These trade realities may seem abstract, but COVID showed how quickly they can become very real. The pandemic exposed our reliance on foreign supply chains and revealed the need to examine underlying economic weaknesses.
I believe that we can write a better future. And while there isn’t a silver bullet for restoring trade balance, we’re already learning lessons about what can work.
Tariffs are a direct policy lever that can be pulled to help bring our trade back into balance. President Joe Biden kept (and even expanded) many of President Donald Trump’s tariffs, and the second Trump Administration has doubled down on the tool. The result is our lowest trade deficit in 17 years.
China’s record trade surplus and the U.S.’s shrinking trade deficit are related. Historically, the U.S. has welcomed cheap Chinese exports with open arms at the expense of weakened domestic manufacturing capacity.
Now, new U.S. tariffs on all manner of Chinese exports meant China had to find alternative markets for their cheap, excess goods. This means that other nations must now share the burden of Chinese exports undercutting their own domestic businesses, manufacturing, and economic security. The U.S. trade deficit has shrunk in part because of this new dynamic.
But tariffs are just one piece of the puzzle to correct a decades-long imbalance.
More solutions outside the tariff box
Recent historic investments in domestic manufacturing, such as the CHIPS and Science Act and the Inflation Reduction Act, have shown it’s still possible to create scores of good-paying jobs in manufacturing — a prerequisite for either increasing exports or reducing demand for foreign products.
Other steps could be on the horizon. Many states are advancing limits on foreign acquisition, and manufacturers have backed my bipartisan permitting bill as a way to boost domestic production.
But we can think even further outside the box about ways to improve American self-sufficiency and reduce the influence of foreign actors on our economy.
States with robust forest product industries, like Maine, could mandate that state and municipal construction used locally sourced building materials. States with strong agricultural traditions could set aspirational targets for feeding themselves without over-reliance on imports and help facilitate contracts between local farmers and their school districts.
Some ideas may work, others may fall short. But to reclaim our domestic wealth and put the ladder back down for our children, we must have the courage to challenge — and fix — America’s trade status quo.