From hereon out I will refer to intentionally made up numbers that are used to either confuse the public (because until now we believed numbers were real) or to support wishful thinking on the part of the policy makers as “mickey mouse economics.”  Here is an example, from Time Magazine (via Menzie Chinn’s Blog)

Mr. Trump holds forth on how he interacts with other heads-of-state (from TIME):

And by the way, Canada? They negotiate tougher than Mexico. Trudeau came to see me, he’s a good man, he said we have no trade deficit with you, we have none. Donald, please. Nice guy, good looking guy. Comes in. Donald we have no trade deficit. He’s very tough. Everyone else, getting killed or whatever. But he’s tough. I said, well Justin, you do. I didn’t even know. Josh, I had no idea. I just said you’re wrong. You’re wrong. It was so stupid. [LAUGHTER]. I thought it was fine. I said, you’re wrong Justin. He said, nope we have no trade deficit. I said, well in that case I feel differently. I said but I don’t believe it. I sent one of our guys out. His guy, my guy. They said check because I can’t believe it. Well, sir you’re actually right, we have no deficit but that doesn’t include energy and timber. [LAUGHTER]. Well you don’t have timber, and when you do we’ll lost $17 billion. It’s incredible.

USTR notes that the 2016 bilateral trade balance between the US and Canada is +12.9 billion.