Thanks for the real numbers, seems charts can be very deceptive. I didn’t really think I was buying more Canadian stuff than Chinese stuff, but sometimes I can get a little local and forget about all those other states on the Canadian border.

The numbers for Canada includes both the US’s exports to Canada and Canada’s exports to the US. It could be considered ‘total’ cross border trade. The net trade (‘balance of trade’) is much closer to zero. With China, the numbers you see are primarily their export to the US, there is a net outward ‘balance of trade’ or deficit.

This is the detailed data:
http://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/Press-Release/current_press_release/exh14.pdf
You can see imports/exports relative to the US broken down by country and net balance of trade.

By the way, for those of you worrying about the US sending all of its money out to the OPEC country’s for oil, take a look at the net balance of trade of China compared to all of OPEC (4th column across.. follow down the left on the country column and there is a whole section for OPEC)