Are trade deficits necessarily unfair? What poll found after Trump’s new tariffs (2025)

Most Americans do not believe trade deficits are inherently unfair, according to a new poll, which comes after President Donald Trump issued sweeping tariffs, citing America’s trade imbalances with other countries.

In a YouGov survey of 1,139 U.S. adults, 57% of respondents said that if the U.S. has a trade deficit with another nation — meaning it imports more from them than it exports to them — this does not necessarily mean that trade with that nation is unfair to America.

In contrast, 22% of respondents said this scenario is unjust, and 21% said they weren’t sure.

There was a noticeable partisan split on this question. Majorities of Democrats and independents — 71% and 58%, respectively — said that trade deficits are not necessarily unfair.

Republicans, meanwhile, were more divided, with 44% saying imbalances aren’t unfair and 36% saying they are unfair.

The poll — conducted April 3-6 with a margin of error of 4 percentage points — comes nearly one week after Trump unveiled his “Liberation Day” tariffs. They include a 10% baseline levy on all foreign imports and higher rates on dozens of countries, including China, Japan and the European Union.

The president rationalized his decision, in part, by pointing to trade deficits.

“Trade deficits are no longer an economic problem, but a national emergency that threatens our security,” Trump said during his April 2 speech.

His administration used trade deficits to calculate tariff rates. The U.S. trade deficit with a specific country was divided by the dollar value of goods imported from that country, and the result was then halved.

But many economists — like the majority of Americans — do not believe trade imbalances necessarily constitute a problem in and of themselves. Instead, they argue they are a natural outcome of globalization.

“A trade deficit sounds bad, but it is neither good nor bad,” Tarek Hassan, a professor of economics at Boston University, wrote in The Conversation. “It doesn’t mean the U.S. is losing money. It simply means foreigners are sending the U.S. more goods than the U.S. is sending them.”

A number of factors contribute to the deficit, including demand for the U.S. dollar — which allows Americans to borrow at lower interest rates — and the global dominance of U.S. companies, Hassan said.

Moreover, tariffs are not an effective remedy for trade imbalances, according to Jason Furman, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

“Evidence and theory (are) very clear that tariffs don’t affect the trade deficit—they shrink both imports and exports,” Furman wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter.

“Reducing the US trade deficit would require promoting a higher domestic rate of savings, especially by the heavily indebted US government—not restricting trade,” economists Andreas Freytag and Phil Levy wrote for the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank.