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@sickburnbro @JoshuaSlocum Indeed, "a lot of companies are nowadays essentially nothing more than importers" although the giants with a huge variety of goods or grocery stores aren't quite so.

We're still for example a food and fossil fuel etc. superpower (we extract more than any other country including Saudi Arabia; funny thing, "drill baby drill" actually worked, although that's shifted around based on refinery sophistication). Wood ... it depends, the Greens did a number of PWN logging, but the paper of various sorts you buy is almost certainly US or Canadian content and made in one of those two places, doesn't make sense for us to ship it across a sea.

Hmmm, if I look at my budget, the vast majority of it is "Made in USA," although insurance costs can be a bit deceptive due to those companies paying re-insurers premiums for huge disasters.

Hmmm, and art isn't a commodity, the small fee I pay to YouTube's superb Never Give In channel which is Japanese isn't substituteble for anything else, ditto more than a few made in Europe classical CDs but that's not much.

Capital and close enough goods are of course a different matter, and I don't own a vehicle so that is a serious skew compared to most people.

And this is even more complicated: the PRC might be "the world's workshop" but they have to import a tremendous amount of stuff, from tens of billions of ball point pen bearings to I've been reading lately ethane from us to make plastics. Decoupling from the PRC is going to be painful, but is absolutely necessary given Xi/the CCP's hatred of us.