You're missing the other choices that link those two things. Being able to export dollars lets the government create new dollars out of thin air, which can be traded for real goods and services - a great deal by any measure. But the political mantra of the last thirty years has been a fake "fiscal responsibility" where the government has been stopped from spending that new money for most deliberate purposes, especially on a large scale (eg subsidizing domestic manufacturing in strategic industries). Yet instead of the natural price deflation that true fiscal responsibility would have brought, economists have declared that our currency still needs to inflate. And so the Fed still creates just as many new dollars, but instead gives them away to banks in the form of low interest loans (fueling the ever growing asset bubble, essentially a handout to asset holders). The combination of all of these are what has decimated our industrial base.