[williamDafoe]

USA has three advantages that no place else in the world has. First we have the biggest oil deposit in the history of mankind with the Permian basin. Second we have more inland waterways in the Mississippi River system than the whole rest of the world combined and third this abuts the best farmland on the planet.

I would say that the USA also has an advantage of open immigration for intellectuals to keep our universities strong but the anti-intellectual Trump administration is destroying this advantage as fast as it can!

The greatest advantage that we ever had was to lead the free world in ideals. A friend of mine was telling me yesterday that every child in India when they reach the age of six wants to go to Harvard and settle in the USA. They want to stand up for freedom and for democracy and for putting down all the evil dictators in the world. We are losing this image very very quickly it could be gone in a matter of months!

Don't brag about our aircraft carriers it would take us 25 years to build 11 more. We are nowhere in ship building we destroyed our domestic shipbuilding in the 1980s when we reoriented it for military shipbuilding and then the Berlin Wall fell down and we drastically cut the military shipbuilding budget and that caused our shipbuilding to go to almost zero overnight (3 heavy ships per year nationwide whereas China's largest ship builder does THIRTY!).

[9rx]

The USA has also been greatly advantaged by being host to the world's reserve currency (also known as having a massive trade deficit). It has been able to buy, buy, buy without needing to sell in kind; essentially getting stuff for free.

But it wants to throw that out the window now too, for some reason. Crazy.