This seems true for most modern, western economies: they are migrating from a producing economy to a service & knowledge economy. Logistics is big (moving stuff) and services are big (consultancy, lawfirms, etc), but the actual factories are gone. And that makes sense: with higher education levels you can make more complex things than the "regular" factories do. Stuff that requires trained staff - brains.

Oh - and btw: the US likely not only refines most oil, it also consumes it: the US have grown to a country based on consumption, spending and borrowing, but not on producing anything. So if goods only come in and money only goes out, there comes a time where the money is gone. And that is when the trouble starts...

> "but not on producing anything"

That's just not accurate. The US produces and exports a wide variety of petroleum based products and lots of oil as well. We import a lot of heavier oil, because we have the capacity to refine it (unlike most nations) and export a lot of the easier to refine stuff.

http://money.cnn.com/2016/06/06/investing/us-oil-exports-inc...

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=25532

And, the US industrial output is at its highest point ever.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/INDPRO

I think you need to normalize by population to get a sense for how much, we as a people, are producing.

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=(industrial+production...

Here the story is that our product has peaked around 2000, and has been doing down ever since.

Except that story would not be true, as it clearly goes up, and has a higher peak after 2000.

Yeah around 2007, but this was relatively short lived.

At the end of the day the perception that economic output is dropping (slope) is valid if you consider it on a per capita basis. Now I'd you consider that the jobs and profits aren'disturbed equally, you can see why Trump won.

But it's not true, the actual factories are still producing, and more than never: http://blogs-images.forbes.com/jonbruner/files/2011/08/value...

> "the US have grown to a country based on consumption, spending and borrowing, but not on producing anything."

Eh, not really. Services and other tertiary industries are just as much "production" as a factory or a mine is. The US government, and US citizens, are not much more indebted than average. You don't "run out of money" by buying foreign goods.

> > "The US doesn't actually do anything with natural resources anymore" ... "we don't "add value" to natural resources"

US #3 oil producer in the world close to Russia and Saudi Arabia

A very distant 4th, though. We consume far more steel than we produce.

But we don't buy those natural resources from other coutries

With the drop in oil prices from the past years, getting oil out of the ground in the US became too expensive. A lot of newly installed sites were closed because they could only operate efficiently with an oil price near $80 a barrel. I am quite sure the US imports a lot of oil...

Edit: quick results from 2015: 25% is imported. https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=32&t=6

Isn't that part of why Republicans are pushing for increased exploration/extraction in many of the public lands found in the west/Alaska?

And when resources start running out elsewhere, it will eventually shift back, that isn't necessarily a bad thing.

A lot of oil is imported for the refineries to process.

https://stateimpact.npr.org/texas/2014/10/28/why-is-the-u-s-...

I stand corrected