Importing the goods, exporting the....
By Lee Russ
Monday, June 26, 2006 at 05:01 PM
Government stats on the level of imports into America, for 1996 through March, 2006 (in thousands of $$):
1997 870,212,682
1998 913,884,886
1999 1,024,765,969
2000 1,216,887,535
2001 1,141,959,125
2002 1,163,548,552
2003 1,259,395,643
2004 1,469,670,757
2005 1,670,940,375
2005 thru March 380,849,917
2006 thru March 435,102,071
That's more than double in the ten years from 1996 through 2005, and you can see that 2006 is pretty likely to exceed 2005. If the same rate of increase continues for the next ten years, we'd be importing $3,340,000,000,000 by 2015. That's $3.34 trillion folks. Somehow I doubt that's even econimcally possible, and may be physically impossible--look around your house and tell me that there are enough items still made in the US that your import purchases would double if all these were imported).
Lou Dobbs is worried about exporting America but we've got an equally large importing non-America problem.