What Xenophobic ass-hats like Pat Buchanan don’t say is that millions of people – who would otherwise have nothing better to do than hate America and start wars with us – are now able to feed their families, educate and vaccinate their children, and possibly even retire before laying on their death-bed.
To describe world GDP in percentages is to assume that economic development is a zero-sum-game and for others to win the US must lose.
According to the International Monetary Fund, the United States began the century producing 32 percent of the world’s gross domestic product. We ended the decade producing 24 percent. No nation in modern history, save for the late Soviet Union, has seen so precipitous a decline in relative power in a single decade.