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expansion. As the population grew, along with the business necessary to support the larger population, more money was printed to supply the country's needs. This of course, did nothing to increase the supply of gold and each dollar printed became worth less and less gold. Business and banking was of course delighted with the larger supply of money-which they could lend, build with, hire workers with and buy more goodies with. Government also began to spend far more money than they took in via taxes and tariffs and in turn, ordered the Federal Reserve to print and lend them more and more money. In 1971, following the lead of the central banks of most other countries, the United States went off the gold standard', meaning dollars no longer had to have any relationship to gold held to redeem it.

As the US economy was prospering and growing in a way unprecedented in history, the US dollar was highly respected and trusted as a medium of exchange all over the world, even though was now basically a piece of fancy paper with very nice engraving. People all over the world trusted the United States not to go back on its word that their money would always be good. Most commodities, including oil were priced on the standard of the US dollar. It was fiat' money, but so was everyone else's and life was good.

Enter the global economy' and with it, the massive outflow of American dollars: off-shore manufacturing caused a huge percentage of dollars to flow directly out of the working class's pockets and into the pockets of Chinese manufacturers, trans-national corporations and the banks of other countries. The response of the US government was simply to borrow' more newly-printed paper from the Fed so they could use it to support the increasing social demands of the population. In an effort to appear that the US was still affluent, and therefore trustworthy as a credit risk, the government allowed unprecedented numbers of low-wage workers to slip into the country to undercut the wages of the working class. This padded the profits of many large corporations, but reduced the supply of dollars American workers could earn and spend. These illegal workers didn't spend the majority of those dollars in the US, however, they sent them home as remittances to their families in their country of origin. Mexico, for instance states that remittances from the US to relatives back home reached $23 billion dollars in 2006-the third largest source of foreign trade income in that nation. Anyone

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