Quote:
Originally Posted by GotHereQuickAsICould
Japan and the EU just signed a trade deal.
China and Mexico are signing trade deals.
Seems that all around us nations are working together on trade.
It's just us and the Brits now.
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Heck, yes, they are!
We Americans are inventive people. We live in a very fruitful spot in the world, where our climate is varied, our lands are huge and fertile, and this allows us to grow just about everything in the world that is food.
Put them together and Americans now feed the most people with the fewest farmers than anywhere else on the planet. 3% of our people grow enough food to keep the other 97% alive, and there is so much more left over the leftovers could keep about 1/16 of the rest of the world alive too.
In all of human history before America came around, the best a farmer could do was keep him and his family alive. If a farmer was really good, and living in a place as good as this, he could keep about 4 or 5 other people alive too. But that depended on a very smart, skillful farmer who had a family full of strong sons, and they all needed to be very smart.
Just 100 years ago- a wink of an eye- an American farmer could feed 300 people. That was remarkable, an achievement no other nation was able to approach or accomplish.
So every other country in the world wanted to learn how we did it, and we taught them. And sold them our inventions, and sold them our farming practices, and we grew all the richer and better at everything. Nowadays, a single farmer with a large farm feeds thousands, while the rest of the world is now feeding hundreds.
But the world is full of smart people, and they too want to feed thousands. They know how to do it. All they need is their government to help them get going, give them the same breaks our government gave our farmers, and they're on their way.
It began long ago, so the rest of the world is catching up to us real fast. Since we can grow almost everything people eat, the rest of the world takes from us what it needs to grow what it can, and puts it to use. They don't have to grow everything to make money. We do. Because we got so good at it.
So now, our tomato farmers are competing with countries that can grow tomatoes when we can't. The world will always have winter and summer, and nothing grows here in the winter. That means our tomato farmers had to find a way to sell their tomatoes in the winter by storing them in a way they wouldn't rot.
So we invented ways to keep tomatoes from rotting. And the rest of the world used those inventions, too. It has become a never ending race for more, because more people are living now, and people eat all the time to stay alive.
The only way America can ever compete with the conditions we created is to sell as much as we can abroad.
If we can't do that, American farms will have to shrink down in size to make shortage as the only way prices can rise enough to make a farmer a profit. Without profit, the farm will shrink anyway, as the equipment wears out and can't be replaced.
And when farmers quit farming, we all will pay a lot more for our food. We now pay less than 25% of what we earn on basic food. The rest of the world pays between 35% to 60% of what they earn for food. In the poorest countries, food can cost a family almost all it's income- as much as 80%.
Americans could find themselves paying those prices for food if trade barriers are thrown up. And once a farm goes back to weeds, it's hard to get it back into production again.
Don't expect an impulsive New York City billionaire who has never set foot in a wheat field to understand a single thing about this. You could grow hungry, but he never will, and he doesn't care if you do.
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