The April 2025 issue of National Review is out. Here’s the Stat, my feature on numbers and economics, from this issue:

$293.3 billion — the U.S. trade surplus in services in 2024, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

What is often called the “trade deficit,” which came in at $1.2 trillion last year, includes only trade in goods. As countries become richer, they transition to buying and selling more services relative to goods. As the world’s richest country, the U.S. naturally specializes more in services. It exported $1.1 trillion in services to the rest of the world last year. Incidentally, it exported nearly twice as much in goods, $2.1 trillion, so the idea that services have “hollowed out” the economy’s ability to export goods is nonsensical. But it does make sense that the richest country on earth would export more services than it imports while importing more goods than it exports. As Scott Lincicome of the Cato Institute has pointed out, Americans can command a higher wage by transporting or marketing T-shirts than they can by making T-shirts. It would be bad for workers if the government tried to reverse the natural trend away from goods and force them into lower-paying jobs. The U.S. services trade surplus isn’t due to U.S. tariffs. There are no tariffs on services at all, and tariffs on goods, such as computers, that are used to perform services can reduce services exports. Protectionists who believe that trade surpluses are good should be celebrating the U.S. services sector, but instead they denigrate it while romanticizing jobs, in steel mills or textile factories, that most Americans haven’t dreamed of doing for decades.