When families live on remote farms, for example, it makes sense to store perhaps a year or more of food for crop failures and other potential disruptions of the food supply. Today, however, with families living in cities, as a practical matter, they instead can only save US dollars. Unfortunately in the event of actual shortages of food and other strategic supplies, numbers in bank accounts obviously will not do the trick.

It is a matter of public purpose to insure there are actual strategic reserves for emergency consumption. Currently we have a strategic oil reserve. This should be extended to stores of other necessities for the purpose of emergency consumption. The purpose should not be to support special interest groups, but to provide the consumer with real supplies of actual consumables for rainy days.