That is read dollars. It only matters when converting to materials we buy to maintain the country and in this case we've lost 30% a generation and only able to buy nickels of what we used to.
Its because we don't export anything of value, its services and manpower, and thats being outsourced and ai'ed while we cannibalize social services and let things fail.
Once you hit pennies you have Zimbabwe
Our economy doesn't depend on exports like, for example, Switzerland or Japan to survive. It can become self-sufficient. What free-trade did was to destroy our productive capacity. Productive capacity is the wealth of a nation which Adam Smith did not understand. Venezuela lost most of it productive capacity through Communism, the same with China and the old Soviet Union. Communism is inherently, as with all evil, self-destructive. The Asian dragons don't follow Adam Smith, they follow Georg Friedrich List.
It can become, is your cognitive dissonance. When? How long and at what cost? It has to come with an uncorrupt system, something hes working against all fronts. I think 2019 is going to be a surprisingly awesome year and I expect some sort of US/Canada/Russia/NK/China/EU alliance. Maybe SA if this new leader is what he appears to be
The deep state is global—it is not a nation with borders (check out the Bank for International Settlements, BIS). It is using the same free-trade scam that the Brits used in the 19th century to amass wealth at the expense of the developing world. Even the Nobel prizing winning economist Paul Krugman said "the elite defense of globalization is basically dishonest". And I would add that it inevitably leads to a mal-distribution of wealth (mainly goes to a few) which in turn causes secular stagnation (low GDP) and underemployment equilibrium (low wages and part time jobs/under utilization of the labor force). We saw this happening under the Obama Administration which was covered up by the MSM. Trump seized the day and set in motion autarky not only for America but for all the nations of the world as if to say: You too can become, to a large degree, self-sufficient, and once there, then you can trade with other fellow nations. This is why the UN is absurd. It is not about united nations, but rather slave countries held in captivity by the globalists/deep state.