Goods Trade Deficit Expands a Shocking 9.2% as Exports Plunge

“every i-phone in the world IS an American export”

No, it’s not.

Very little of it can be produced at all, much less competitively, in the US anymore. What is produced here, can 95% be replicated elsewhere. It largely remains here on account of overhang from back when American decay hadn’t yet gone so far.

There are powerful reasons to stay with even overpriced products, when so much of the value of a product results fro the network of others already invested in it. Being the first guy to leave to start his own network, is never easy. So you can hang on being inefficient for quite some time, before your underperformance becomes so obvious that members of a network as big as the I-one packs up and leaves. But what you can’t avoid, is more and more of the components supporting your network, being more efficiently made elsewhere. So that you in the end, are contributing little more than a stable artifact of what once was greatness. Little innovation, little efficiency improvement, little of anything. And more and more of nothing but cheering for ever more heavy handed totalitarians to “protect” you from more competent and efficient people. IOW, instead of adding value, you are, too, becoming just another rent seeker in a dystopia fit for little else.