Simple: because we're not using very much of it, and it's often cheaper to get what we need elsewhere. (Same dynamic, IOW, that's in play with oil imports, many food items, and manufacturing.)
As you can see, however, we're not uranium-free:
Posted on 06/16/2009 4:36:09 PM PDT by Wontsubmit
This week marks the end of the dollar’s reign as the world’s reserve currency. It marks the start of a terrible period of economic and political decline in the United States. And it signals the last gasp of the American imperium. That’s over. It is not coming back. And what is to come will be very, very painful.
Barack Obama, and the criminal class on Wall Street, aided by a corporate media that continues to peddle fatuous gossip and trash talk as news while we endure the greatest economic crisis in our history, may have fooled us, but the rest of the world knows we are bankrupt. And these nations are damned if they are going to continue to prop up an inflated dollar and sustain the massive federal budget deficits, swollen to over $2 trillion, which fund America’s imperial expansion in Eurasia and our system of casino capitalism. They have us by the throat. They are about to squeeze.
There are meetings being held Monday and Tuesday in Yekaterinburg, Russia, (formerly Sverdlovsk) among Chinese President Hu Jintao, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and other top officials of the six-nation Shanghai Cooperation Organization. The United States, which asked to attend, was denied admittance. Watch what happens there carefully. The gathering is, in the words of economist Michael Hudson, “the most important meeting of the 21st century so far.”
It is the first formal step by our major trading partners to replace the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. ...
(Excerpt) Read more at truthdig.com ...
Then why don’t we produce any?
I wouldn’t mind seeing your response to post 40 as well.
Simple: because we're not using very much of it, and it's often cheaper to get what we need elsewhere. (Same dynamic, IOW, that's in play with oil imports, many food items, and manufacturing.)
As you can see, however, we're not uranium-free:
We managed to "convince" them because we had that lucky combination of motivated and intelligent people (the "mental/cultural" part), coupled with incredibly vast resources. Our money was better, because it was backed up by real wealth in the form of factories, people, and products.
As I said above, our main difficulties have to do with the mental/cultural part, which is actually a result of decadence brought on by previous wealth. The momentum and inertia gained from that earlier success is immense, and we've been coasting on those past successes for a long time, and friction has only gradually made its effects known. This is a very common cultural malady; history is full of similar examples.
The "top-heavy" aspects you mention are very real. IMO, they're a result of the fact that our expectations for pay, benefits, and comfort are very high, and our motivation is rather diminished. At the same time, we're in direct competition with lower-cost, highly motivated labor overseas. So the natural (and profit-driven) tendency is to let the low-cost guys do the labor, and jobs here tend to be based on the use of end-products rather than the creation of them.
The transition back to a "creative" economy in the US really depends on the restoration of two things: lower costs here, and motivation to succeed. An economic crash would be very ugly, but it would restore that part of the dynamic. The rest of the equation is to have resources on which to operate: energy, raw materials, and so on, and we have those in abundance.
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