Coincidentally, our debt crossed into uncharted territory last week. Couple this with underemployment, rising welfarism (note the condition of this president's political home state), and the massively orchestrated illegal alien invasion promulgated with further illegality through an unconstitutional and costly executive amnesty for cheap labor (formerly thought to hurt employment and strain welfare by this president). Whether directly or indirectly, the results similarly contribute to you-know-who's decadent path of fundamental transformation...
MarketWatch: Hang on to your hats, America.Perhaps the idea between Democratic statists and the GOP Establishment, all with bundlers and donors in tow, is to infuse cheap labor (albeit, illegal) into the American market in a last ditch effort to increase goods and services? But what of added welfarism and citizen unemployment that's certain to grow with population boom in the Nanny State? (We know the truer intention is to drive Democratic Party enrollment, but these are also intended consequences)
And throw away that big, fat styrofoam finger while you’re about it.
There’s no easy way to say this, so I’ll just say it: We’re no longer No. 1. Today, we’re No. 2. Yes, it’s official. The Chinese economy just overtook the United States economy to become the largest in the world. For the first time since Ulysses S. Grant was president, America is not the leading economic power on the planet.
It just happened — and almost nobody noticed.
The International Monetary Fund recently released the latest numbers for the world economy. And when you measure national economic output in “real” terms of goods and services, China will this year produce $17.6 trillion — compared with $17.4 trillion for the U.S.A.
As recently as 2000, we produced nearly three times as much as the Chinese.
To put the numbers slightly differently, China now accounts for 16.5% of the global economy when measured in real purchasing-power terms, compared with 16.3% for the U.S.
This latest economic earthquake follows the development last year when China surpassed the U.S. for the first time in terms of global trade.
Our leaders are also missing a broader, yet dire historic lesson...
Good luck finding those liberties, processes and rights that have maintained our prolonged status in any other corner of the world.Yes, all statistics are open to various quibbles. It is perfectly possible China’s latest numbers overstate output — or understate them. That may also be true of U.S. GDP figures. But the IMF data are the best we have.
Make no mistake: This is a geopolitical earthquake with a high reading on the Richter scale. Throughout history, political and military power have always depended on economic power. Britain was the workshop of the world before she ruled the waves. And it was Britain’s relative economic decline that preceded the collapse of her power. And it was a similar story with previous hegemonic powers such as France and Spain.
This will not change anything tomorrow or next week, but it will change almost everything in the longer term. We have lived in a world dominated by the U.S. since at least 1945 and, in many ways, since the late 19th century. And we have lived for 200 years — since the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 — in a world dominated by two reasonably democratic, constitutional countries in Great Britain and the U.S.A. For all their flaws, the two countries have been in the vanguard worldwide in terms of civil liberties, democratic processes and constitutional rights.
