This is what Donald Trump understands. This is the trade deficit. We run a trade deficit of close to $800 billion a year.

Donald Trump is not a protectionist. If he imposes tariffs on China or any other country that cheats, all he wants to do is defend America against unfair trade practices.

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.

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.

No one should be surprised just because somebody isn't successful 100 percent of the time.

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.

The really big problem with China is that there are the unfair trade practices, like currency manipulation, illegal export subsidies and the theft of intellectual property, but then there's also things that the WTO doesn't cover that it should, which is the use of sweat shops and pollution havens.