Before everyone gets their panties in a bunch, how much do you look at the fundamentals of world economies?
It may seem that we don’t make anything because of the lables you see on some products, but China has a lot more people than we do, in fact the 300 million or so residents we have isn’t anywhere near where we should be relative to our GDP.
Look at the chart, ignore the eurozone listing because they don’t give it a ranking because they break out the various countries as well.
We essentially make 3x what china does, not per person, but as a whole.
The United States is 1/4 of the world economy we have about 300 million people in a world of nearly 7 billion. Does that sound like last place to you? We are first by a mile, our per capita gdp is ahead of all the big countries
China and India combine for 37% of the world population and about 9% of the world economy. The US accounts for 25% of the world economy with about 4% of the population. We can argue gnp,gdp,exports,labor, blah blah blah. But it comes down to the fact that we are still way out in front and if you want to be honest with yourself, we have all that we need, even now, in our darkest days, we have too much food.
Here’s why history and anectdotes don’t matter. We work, hell we work too much. We have the longest workweeks, the shortest vacations, the longest working lives. Sure we end up with shorter lifespans, more heart attacks, high divorce and substance abuse rates. Those are the side effects of who we are, but ending up like Spain or some other former superpower, sorry, not going to happen. We will have bad years, we may lose some ground and some industries, but we keep coming up with new ones.
And I don’t care where my macbook was fabricated, the money for the most part, stays here. Oil, Schmoil, we will invent a new fuel source and then license it to other countries to make it and ship it back to us, thats what we do, we screw everybody else and reap the fruits of their labor, we aren’t getting rich on the backs of americans, we live well because of places like china and we dont take naps and enjoy life like europeans, that’s why we wont end up like them. Please, an American on welfare lives better than 95% of the planet. I’m all out of tears and I’m more worried about the NBA lockout than I am about us losing our place in the world economy.
