The United States government use to back the dollar with gold, but in the depths of the depression, FDR took the United States off of the gold standard in 1933, with the additional requirement by law that all citizens that had either gold bullion, coin, or certificates must redeem those items by May 1, 1933, at the redemption price of $20.67 per ounce. Then, in 1934, the United States returned to the gold standard, and set the price of gold at $35/ounce, effectively inflating the price of gold by 69%, which simultaneously took away real assets from people that had redeemed their gold by deflating their net worth with the new government manipulated increase in gold pricing. The price of gold remained stable, though, by law until 1971, when President Nixon took America off of the gold standard, once and for all, to which the country since that time has not returned to it.
Today, our country has a deficit of approximately $17,810 billion dollars, whereas in 1971 the deficit was under $400 billion dollars. Today, gold is worth $1323/ounce whereas the price was previously fixed at $35/ounce. The dollars that we use to conduct our business and financial transactions today, states that: "This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private." The note, aka the dollar, is backed by the Federal Reserve, it is not redeemable in gold or any other specie, and is primarily backed by government debt, issued in the form of US treasuries, and their equivalencies. Since 1971, America has had double-digit inflation in four different years, although none during this current millennium.
The fundamental problem with the issuance and use of dollars today as our currency is that there is no real foundational soundness backing the value of the dollar, other than that it seems to work, even though the overall deficit that we have accumulated year by year has gotten larger and larger, with little or no constraints on this government largess and mismanagement of the commonweal. In order to rein in this free spending mindset that is in essence sticking future generations with debt created by the present generation and those before it, the dollar should be constrained and this could be done by using oil or possibly other domestic natural resources as the backing for the dollar.
The thing about oil is that America has a good abundance of it, to which America is now, once again the largest oil producer in the world. Additionally, oil, bar none, is the most important commodity in the world and has been the most important commodity in the world for a century; in addition, fundamentally much of this nation's success, power, and wealth, is due to the successful exploration and exploitation of petroleum.
It is only natural then, that there should be a formal union of oil with the United States dollar, which will by its effectiveness, constrain the Federal government from running amok, and force it to get its fiscal house in order. This would not only stabilize America, but would also allow, the US dollar to continue to be the monetary medium of value for other countries to establish their currencies against, so that, in effect, America's oil-backed dollar would become a true stable value as an international currency reserve.