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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: i-node who wrote (419681)	9/24/2008 7:23:14 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 1575611

It is, basically, the amount of money by which our currency is inflated annually by virtue of not being energy independent. Buying a product from another country isn't exactly the same thing as inflating the currency. I understand that we are running a trade deficit and borrowing money from other countries, so these two ideas are not toally unconnected, but I wouldn't simply say that buying oil equals inflating the currency. Certainly there is no one for one mapping where when we buy a dollars worth of foreign products we inflate our currency by a dollar. And its not even like a 2 for 1 or 10 for 1 or 100 for 1, there is no specific direct connection, its an indirect uncertain and relatively small connection (at least small relevantly to the total number of dollars. And not even a connection with only one direction. Buying from other countries helps control costs and prices, and thus helps contain inflation, or at least prices which are what we use to measure inflation, even if you only look at monetary changes as really being inflation, and ignore any other changes in price, as some people do. I suppose if you hold that view, you could measure inflation by changes in monetary supply, but a steady supply with a growing economy is generally considered deflation. You could try to look at changes in monetary supply compared to the real growth in the economy, but real growth is measured as growth minus inflation, and so you need to know inflation before you can measure real growth in the first place. Also "energy independence" technically means no import of energy. The current amount we spend on imports doesn't equal the "of not being energy independent". ----- If I was trying to make your point, I might say something like "It is, basically, the amount we spend on oil imports each year". OK, so it is. But I don't see why that's a particularly meaningful fact in terms of arguing that its not such a big deal. The price we pay for that oil is a very large price (as would be the price we would pay for domestic fossil fuels, alternative fuels, and/or non fuel energy production in any attempt to make us "energy independent".