[pasquinelli]

you don't export culture, you export stuff. it sounds like you're disgreeing with "america runs on money, not culture", but the fact you conflate culture with, like, movies sold internationally proves the point: american culture is in the form of market transactions. given that, how do you end up with "culturally too big to fail?"

and i'd dispute that entertainment is our #1 export. not all exports are on the books; i'd bet arms is our real #1 export.

[chroma]

You can look this information up pretty easily.[1] If you only count physical goods, the US's biggest exports are cars, aircraft, petroleum, food, drugs, industrial machinery, and semiconductors. Even if we count the value of all the military equipment sold to allies such as the Netherlands, France, Japan, Korea, the UK, etc, and we count all the Ukraine aid, the total value last year was $205.6 billion. That's less than petroleum exports ($258.3B) or food ($208.2B).

1. See page 22-23 of https://www.bea.gov/sites/default/files/2023-02/trad1222.pdf

2. FY2022 had $51.9B of sales to foreign militaries and $153.7B direct commercial sales, for a total of $205.6B: https://www.state.gov/fiscal-year-2022-u-s-arms-transfers-an...

[pasquinelli]

>> not all exports are on the books

> You can look this information up pretty easily.

if you read what i wrote carefully you'll see you can't just look this information up pretty easily.