Poppycock. Name one thing from lunar landers to soy beans that the USA can't make. Bananas? LOL. The USA was self sufficient in everything up the 1950's.
Okay, by all means wave that magic wand of presumptiousness and come up with those rare earths, for one thing, beyond their availability as curiosities.
We can’t turn back the clock on that — and why would we want to?
Poppycock? You ought to know it, having generated enough of it yourself.
Here’s where you could get a clue from President Trump. Everything is a potential negotiation tool. Everything. Don’t be wallowing in nostalgia; move forward in wisdom.
By the way, if you want better farming here, which is an area you did touch upon, then stop doing stupid things like paying farmers not to farm.
And the USA still has a latent potential to sell to the world, too. It still manages to do so with food, and one of the things negotiated with China is to sell American meats there. China of its own self can’t come up practically with everything it needs to enter the first world either. It even stinks at pollution control technology, literally stinks — things that the USA takes for granted today, and is rich in. If an area of the USA got like Beijing, or like any major Chinese river, the scandal would be unbelievable. And we take it for granted.
Put a great negotiator at the helm, and there are more ways to break even or better than break even. This isn’t yesteryear, and we can’t go there anyhow. We wouldn’t fit yesteryear. We’ve grown.
And so what if you won’t be reconstructed and don’t give a damn. The rest of the USA will give a damn, and will reconstruct around you, leaving you in your own little wallow (nobody’s forcing you out as long as you can manage to stay alive) but also leaving your legacy to the ash heap of history too.
“The USA was self sufficient in everything up the 1950’s.”
I think you may be missing something with this statement. The US doesn’t desire to be self sufficient. We are not equal to most of the rest of the world, we are stronger. But we can’t just throw money at them so they can buy food and not go next door and start a war to get some. There’s too much power out there and too many vultures ready to kindle the fire like China, Russia, Pakistan, Germany.....long list.
Petroleum is a perfect example. Our actual reserves are in two places, one is buried along the American Gulf Coast and contains 700M barrels. But that is tiny compared to the oil we have in Alaska and the Rocky Mountains, untapped. We don’t need to buy oil from anyone as we are the largest exporter of petroleum products in the world without our ground based supply just from our sources right now.
The US is also the largest of exporter of food in the world more than doubling the amount from second place Germany and is the second most dollar value exporter in the world behind China. But China is running at a 20.1% loss as we speak and won;t be able to maintain that number. And a majority of their exports are non-staples like high tech. Can’t eat it.
I hope this helps you understand that world trade is not all dollars and cents, but also is a commodity to keep from having a catastrophy because one country couldn’t pay their bill and had to take from next door. Especially when the reality has been surfacing that a lot of these little countries have got some serious firepower and too many countries with even more would exuberantly pile on.
rwood