$20.91 Billion Spent On Foreign Oil In July

The July trade deficit was $42.8 billion. Oil accounted for $20.91 billion of our foreign trade deficit in July.

At a time when the nation needs jobs, I thought it might be interesting to look at that number in terms of how many jobs that money could have provided had it been spent on domestically produced energy.

Robert Scott with the liberal Economic Policy Institute, argued that each $1 billion in imports displaces about 8,000 U.S. jobs - just as each $1 billion in exports would create 8,000 jobs. - Source

According to my calculator, had that money stayed here it would have provided 167,280 people with jobs for a year.