Official U.S. statistics fail to capture the surging imports of packages that are exempt from tariffs.
This is a stupid article. The $800 lid is where you start paying import duty, and it's a step from $0 to $75 or so. Now you know why a Prusa i3 kit is $799 - it's deliberately priced to get under VAT. The author has basically discovered duty-free sales and uncovered a conspiracy. This trade deficit wouldn't be a deficit, by the way, if it weren't such an expensive pain in the ass to ship stuff out of the US. I can get a pair of brake reservoirs from Shenzen for $4. Getting them back is $80. I can get a Nikon lens from Cambodia for $30. Getting it back is $140. And the Chinese bump has a lot more to do with Chinese vendors skirting Chinese law than anything else. See this guy? He's $2900 from Yaskawa USA. OR, you find a Chinese seller who told the Chinese government that he's setting up a machine shop to crush the imperialists, ordered a fuckton of Japanese parts and liquidated them on eBay because too bad, so sad, his machine shop never took off. So the servos come to you for $190 ea, with an apology from the seller that they have labels on them saying "prototype" from a manufacturer that never existed, that's okay you can get them off with hand sanitizer. I've saved about $30k in the past year riding that wave. Know what? never once have I had a shipment over $800. If you buy more than $800 worth of crap, they break it up into multiple shipments. Now, who's on the hook for that $30k? The CCP. So yeah - on the one hand it sucks that the US government doesn't get $36k worth of duty on $36k worth of Japanese parts. It sucks that my state doesn't get sales tax on $36k worth of Japanese parts. But it kinda sucks worse that the Chinese are eating $36k on $36k worth of parts while industrious vendors on eBay fence stolen shit out the door. Me? I like paying $600/axis better than $6k an axis and you know what? I had to pay $1600 duty on a used machine tool that drifted from Germany to Vietnam to Germany to Seattle over 30 years. We did this about the same time we started aggressively repatriating foreign funds. Increase De Minimis from $200 to $800, shut down numbered bank accounts, increase seizure rights, streamline the the trade schedule... did a bunch of shit. Focusing on "hey Aliexpress is another 10% on top of declared customs" is myopic in the extreme.