The Donald Trump trade doctrine is this. America will trade with any country, so long as that deal meets these three criterion: You increase the GDP growth rate, you decrease the trade deficit, and you strengthen the manufacturing base.

The Donald Trump trade doctrine is this. America will trade with any country, so long as that deal meets these three criterion: You increase the GDP growth rate, you decrease the trade deficit, and you strengthen the manufacturing base.

When we run these big trade deficits and send our jobs offshore, we hold our wages down and our income down. That feeds right back into the biggest part of this whole equation, consumption. This drags GDP down as well.

Unfair trade practices drive up rents for younger people. They will drive up home prices for first-time home-buyers. So it's not just that we're losing jobs and factories. We're giving away our homes, our businesses, our companies, our technologies.

We're going right down the toilet, and it's a made-in-China toilet. I teach MBAs. And I noticed, starting a few years after China joined the World Trade Organization, that a lot of my students were no longer employed. They were still coming to get their MBA, but they'd lost their jobs.

The policy goal is to persuade China to stop cheating. But here's what's interesting - Donald Trump intuitively understands what things should be. I did a study in 2008 where I estimated the impact of China's unfair trade practices on their competitive advantage - the so-called China Price. You know what it came out to be? Forty-three percent. Forty-three percent - very close to what his intuition said we needed in order to equalize things.

If you've been to China, you know there are over 100 cities in China, and the pollution levels are just horrific - 60,000 people a year die in Chinese factories and facilities, because they don't have any safety regulations. It's a carnage; it's Dickensian.