“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
Says who? The Chinese? The EU? Korea? Japan? All practice obscene mercantilism against the USA. LOL. I guess you missed the whole Trump thing.
If you not for stopping this the you are simply a traitor.
Exporting food and importing durable goods is what the revolutionary war was fought to stop. You would have been hung as a Tory in 1776.