Thursday, March 28, AD 2024 4:38pm

Nineteen Trillion Dollar Economy

The size of the American economy is hard to comprehend.  By the end of the year total GDP should be a bit north of nineteen trillion dollars.  Our closest economic competitors, Europe and China, should have economies slightly more than half the size of ours.  (Japan has an economy of about five trillion dollars by comparison.)  In real terms the US economy has tripled in size in real terms since 1980.  Economic growth in the US since Reagan took office has created an economy the size of Europe and China.  Part of this is caused by the growth in population, but the result is still quite impressive.  In the past quarter the economy grew at 3.7% per annum.  Trump and the GOP are betting that the tax bill being passed today will help ensure that type of growth for the next decade.  Tax cuts usually have spurred economic performance in the past, and absent some huge world wide catastrophe I see no reason why they should not do so in the future.  We will all see.  However, always recall that economics is called the dismal science for good reason.

 

0 0 votes
Article Rating
16 Comments
Oldest
Newest Most Voted
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
T. Shaw
T. Shaw
Tuesday, December 19, AD 2017 7:25am

NYT editorialist, Princeton econ prof, Nobel econ prize recipient Klown Krugman on Election Night, ” “If the question is when will markets recover, a first-pass answer is never.” Dow is about to cross 25,000, so far has posted 70 record-high closes in 2017, 2017 likely will record 12 months of market index gains, and is way over 5,000 points higher than when the clown uttered the asinine statement.

It was easy and simple.

Reverse eight years of Obama and the gripe-ocrats stifling/over-regulating/taxing/killing coal/trashing the engines of growth . . .

Pinky
Pinky
Tuesday, December 19, AD 2017 3:20pm

The EU economy is almost the same size as the US economy.

Foxfier
Admin
Tuesday, December 19, AD 2017 3:48pm

I got curious.

EU:
GDP is estimated at 17.3 Trillion US dollars
Land mass: 4.32 million sq km
Population: 509.67 million (2015)

US:
GDP estimated 18.57 Trillion US dollars
Landmass: 9.83 million sq km
Population: 290.1 million

Foxfier
Admin
Tuesday, December 19, AD 2017 3:49pm

I *think* this is with the UK.

Foxfier
Admin
Tuesday, December 19, AD 2017 3:59pm

….I just sincerely depressed myself by looking up some of the “big” parks in Europe, and finding out that most of them are smaller than the little, developed, camping parks in Washington State.

Michael Dowd
Michael Dowd
Wednesday, December 20, AD 2017 3:11am

Thank God for Donald Trump. Where would we be with Hillary?

Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus
Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus
Wednesday, December 20, AD 2017 5:15am

So from what Foxfier pointed out, the EU has slightly less GDP than the US, but almost double its population, which means that its human productivity is half the US. I think this is true. Recently I met the son-in-law of a family acquaintance who lives and works in the UK. His typical day as he described it is to come into work, have breakfast and then a several hour meeting to plan the day, at the end of which is a break for coffee or tea, followed by a discussion of where to go for lunch and lunch itself, after which there is another meeting to discuss the afternoon’s planned activities followed by an end-of-day summary of the day’s “accomplishments.” He was proud of this arrangement. Positively proud. Worthless useless millennial snowflake airhead pro-abort, pro-sodomy Eurocrat (he worked as a bureaucrat on the staff of a University and he told me the UK’s problems were all caused by Margaret Thatcher’s conservatives).

No wonder the new reactor complex at Hinckley Point cannot get built, and Parliament can’t decide on which small modular reactor vendor to go with, and that’s just my industry: billions and billions of pounds being wasted. Between Muslim immigration & Sharia Law enclaves, and the indolence & decadence of these millennials, people in the UK will eventually freeze in the dark and they will have deserved it because they are doing it to themselves. I got no pity for most Europeans – the French, the British, the Germans, the Italians, the Spanish – though Poland and some of the ex-Soviet bloc nations are a happy exception to the rule of European sloth.

Foxfier
Admin
Wednesday, December 20, AD 2017 8:25am

LQC– they also have a *lot* more of their land available, for buildings if nothing else. 300,000 square meters as a big park, holy cow! (that’s less than 75 acres)

Donald– I thought you might mean the thing that kept popping up, the “EU15,” basically “The original EU countries before a bit over a decade back.”

Heck of a way to hack a GDP increase!

Foxfier
Admin
Wednesday, December 20, AD 2017 9:29am

Just tried to correct for the whole Europe-is-old thing– Maine is a little bigger than Austria.

They also have one of the national parks always prefaced with something like “it’s small, but wow”– Acadia.

That is 192 sq km.
Bialowieza National Park– the place with European bison– is 152sq km.

(secondary note– Wikipedia is useless for this, it does count National Parks…. but doesn’t include National Forests, and National Wildlife Refuges as gov’t owned parks [30% of the US] nor does it include state parks.)

No wonder they have such a horrifically hard time wrapping their heads around the idea of how much totally empty space we have out here….

Clinton
Clinton
Wednesday, December 20, AD 2017 9:54am

I wonder what Europe’s economy would look like if the United States
wasn’t shouldering a substantial part of that continent’s defense. For
example, for decades our leaders have complained that Europe isn’t
bearing its fair share of the costs of NATO.

While noting that it’s rather difficult to arrive at a clear figure for our
total defense expenditures, a Center for Strategic and International
Studies
paper recently came up with the total of $905 billion for
FY2017. That figure is roughly 10X the military expenditures of the
three leading NATO European states: France, Germany and the UK.

https://www.csis.org/analysis/us-military-spending-cost-wars

David
David
Wednesday, December 20, AD 2017 12:15pm

Trump is purposely letting the progressive media spin this badly,, until people see a break in their taxes come January and job creation by corporations with lower taxes next year. Let the Dems dig their own grave.
What will the Democrats say? That lower taxes and jobs -are “bad” things?

Foxfier
Admin
Wednesday, December 20, AD 2017 12:22pm

To support Clinton’s point– a part of their obligation to NATO is to spend 2% of GDP on defense, since 2014.
In 2015, a couple of countries managed it. (Where is Estonia, anyways…Ah, the impression of “next to Russia” was right…and they’ve got a sea-border. No wonder they’ve been spending.)

We’re now up to Romania, Poland,Greece, Estonia, the UK and the US.

Might remember the hissy-fits when Trump pointed this out earlier this year.

Penguins Fan
Penguins Fan
Wednesday, December 20, AD 2017 5:03pm

The next big step is to completely repeal Obumblercare. While the individual mandate is history, the other regulations remain and they still, to some extent, cripple job growth and shrink disposable income. I think the GOP picks up at least a few Senate seats and Obumblercare is toast in early 2019.

The high income blue staters that used to be able to fully deduct their real estate and state income taxes (New Jersey is sky high, for one) will have that deduction capped at $10,000. They are always the ones supporting the Democrats and their higher taxes. Let them pay thoise higher taxes.

Penguins Fan
Penguins Fan
Wednesday, December 20, AD 2017 5:13pm

Foxfier, the Bialowieza National Park was once much larger. It is the home of the rare European bison. After WWII, since much of that park was east of the Curzon Line, Poland lost it to Belarus and Ukraine.

Foxfier
Admin
Wednesday, December 20, AD 2017 6:10pm

Penguins Fan– they’ve re-expanded to include the area in Belarus for the whole park. There’s even a border crossing inside! The measure I gave is for the whole thing. Up to 600 head, estimated, now.

Discover more from The American Catholic

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading

Scroll to Top