Gotcha.

This year through September, the U.S. imported $1.3 trillion worth of goods and services, while chalking up just $850 billion in exports. So if both keep growing equally fast, the trade gap will get bigger and bigger.

When the dollar falls, the trade deficit usually gets bigger at first, not smaller. Here's why: Other countries charge higher dollar prices for goods they sell in the U.S. to compensate for the greenback's weakness. Americans continue to buy the same volume of goods from abroad, only now they pay more for each unit, so the total import bill rises.

Americans are the world's worst undersavers. The personal-savings rate has fallen from 10% or 12% in the 1970s and early '80s to just 0.2% in September.

The solution to the trade deficit is for other nations to loosen up and spend while Americans stop living beyond their means. But that goes beyond economics into the realm of national personality transplants.

(I hope I haven't exceeded the % limit)
MSNBC

By Peter Coy

So 'splain this to me, Lucy - where did the $450 billion mentioned in the first paragraph come from?

And why are more people not worried about it? It seems more Americans are concerned about who will get kicked off Survivor or who Trump will fire on the Apprentice than whether there is going to be an economy in the future.

Canada's economy is doing quite well right now, the federal gov't has run a surplus for several years including almost $10 billion this year, the CDN$ is higher against the US$ than it's been for years (despite the nasty US defiance of WTO and NAFTA rulings that softwood lumber duties imposed by the US were improper - $3.5 billion is being illegally withheld from Canadian forest companies, among other inequities). Most of Canada's exports go to the US.

But if the US economy tanks, it will negatively affect almost everyone, and Canada perhaps more than most.

As our late Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau said, "Living next to you is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant. No matter how friendly and even-tempered is the beast, if I can call it that, one is affected by every twitch and grunt."

from here