America’s #1 Industry and #1 Export

(They Are Not What You Think They Are)

Among the dysfunctional family of nations, America stands at the top when measured by the sheer size of its financial empire. It’s unprecedented in global influence, far beyond the Roman, Qing, Spanish, and British empires of history.

Americans work hard. They produce an enormous amount of value every year. They create billions of dollars in new real estate and building construction, power generation and distribution, air, land and sea transportation, food production, information technology, medical and scientific advances, not to mention billions more in arts like music and movies. The US economy is a juggernaut of production and human advancement.

But for all that effort from all those millions of productive workers, managers, and innovators, the biggest Industry and the biggest Export of the United States are rarely spoken about.

America’s #1 Industry

Even some of the highly visible contenders pale by comparison to #1. The entire US energy industry takes in somewhere around a $1.5 trillion dollars annually. That includes all the oil and gas, electric power, renewables, coal, nuclear, and the distribution of all the above.

Transportation is another behemoth that tallies around $1.5 trillion dollars annually. And that’s for all freight trucking, passenger and cargo airlines, railroads, maritime shipping, public transit and all of the supporting logistics and warehousing.

I think it’s fair to say that those expenses impact all of us. Chances are everything in your home spent some time on a truck, and a lot of it had to arrive from some place so far away that a truck can’t do the job. And we all have energy bills to pay, not to mention all the food we buy.

But each of those is still a fraction of our total annual expenses.

So what’s #1? What demands more than anything else? Governance. The absolutely massive boulder we all carry on our backs throughout our entire lifetimes is the cost of our own governance.

In the US in 2024 that looks something like this:

• Federal Government Spending: $6.9 trillion according to the US Treasury Department.

• State Government Spending: $2.9 trillion, however $1 trillion of that comes from the Feds, so call the State portion $1.9 trillion annually, according to the National Association of State Budget Officers.

• Local Government Spending: According to the Urban Institute, cities, townships, counties, school districts, and special districts spend about $1.9 trillion annually.

These add up to $10.7 trillion every year out of a total GDP of about $29 trillion. This is money you pay. And unlike flying on a passenger jet or turning up your furnace, these are mandatory pay-or-go-to-prison expenses that we all have to pay before we even think about those orthodontics for our kid or getting new tires on our car.

And I won’t even get into all the promises made to people expecting Medicare and Social Security in the future and how many unfunded trillions those add up to. The yet-to-be-born will inherit that bondage — and still be relentlessly told how free they are. Free as long as they keep up the payments, otherwise it’s prison for them too.

There is no industry on earth that takes in $10 trillion a year, never mind a single industry in America. The cost of your governance - people controlling you - is the #1 Industry in America by a very wide margin.

(And yes, I know that some of what is provided for that money would be things I’d volitionally agree to buy. But I’m not interested in paying a giant government agency to control the importation of French cheese or another agency to slap a big tariff on that Italian motorcycle I’d like to buy. Plus I’m very confident the services I do want could be had for a lot less money.)

America’s #1 Export

You might have heard, even using the government’s own monkey numbers, the federal government admits the US National Debt is now north of $35 trillion. And another trillion gets thrown on that pile every few months now.

Just this amount burdens every living taxpayer to a debt of $269,000. No matter how long you live and how much you pay, this personal obligation never gets smaller.

So how does a government “keep taxes low” while scattering money like a supernova distributes radiation?

The short answer is; it prints it. But we know places like Zimbabwe and Hungary tried that and ended up with inflation rate percentages in the thousands annually. Sometimes the value of their money was cut in half in a single day.

So how can the US print trillions of dollars every year and not have the same thing happen as Zimbabwe? In a word, hegemony. Dominance of all global matters.

Thanks to it’s 750 offshore military bases and US troops stationed in 159 foreign countries and its open belligerence to any country that will not fully align itself with US interests, the US can force - and I mean force! - other countries to trade in US dollars for most of their big ticket expenses. If they want something costing billions, they need to buy it in US dollars.

U.S. Military Bases around the World

And equally important, America politicians can also force these other countries to accept US dollars when the US wants to buy anything from them. So when the US buys machinery from Germany, mobile phones from China, pharmaceuticals from India, and cars from Canada it never has to pay in the local currency.

Instead, the American government can just print up some fresh trillions and hand it to people outside of the country. Zimbabwe couldn’t do that. Hungary couldn’t do that. And we’re talking about trillions of dollars every single year.

So America’s #1 Export is…inflation. Even the other big export sectors like planes, industrial and construction machinery, and computers are only about $100 billion or so each. Everything pales to the inflationary money the US spends worldwide. Print it for free - force people to accept it - then boast about your great country and its good standard of living! Nice. Keep the whole field tilted so all the marbles roll one way.

In a way, this is nothing new. A couple of centuries ago the British did it. Back then they had the warships and the big geographic footprint to dictate terms to everyone who had something they wanted. Now America is doing it. Maybe China will be next. The victims are always the little guys trying to get through life without being robbed of what they worked for. But they always get robbed. Because all Nation States are giant coercion machines that plunder in order to exist and to exert governance over their domestic victims…sorry — beloved citizens.

Someday we’ll have peaceful human governance that people only purchase by volitional choice and can opt out of when they want. Until then nobody is actually living in Freedom. That why we’re constantly told we are.