US economic power

[Shek]

Statistics...
You're right for official exchange rates (but everybody knows that the Renminbi is too cheap). But you're wrong at purchasing power parity exchange rates.

USA:
GDP = USD 13.84 trillion
industry: 20.5% share of GDP
2.837 trillion industrial value added, USD

PR China:
GDPppp = USD 6.991 trillion
GDP = USD 3.251 trillion
industry: 48.6% share of GDP
3.398 trillion industrial value added, USDppp
1.580 trillion industrial value added, USD

As I said before, money is just an illusion. The offiial exchange rates are a wrong illusion.
PPP exchange rates are a less incorrect illusion.

(source: CIA World Factbook, everything 2007 estimates)

Fuchs,
Good point about PPP - I hadn't realized that the stats didn't incorporate PPP. Once you adjust the UNIDO statistics quoted in the piece based on the recent PPP revision from the World Bank, I still come up with the US being #1. We could spin around whether CIA estimates are better than UN/World Bank statistics, but we'll just obfuscate the larger point I was making that the US is by no means a faltering manufacturing state (and instead, remains either #1 or at worse, a very close #2). We could also look at the composition of the US manufacturing sector and decide that it tends to be at the higher end, making it well suited for the type of technology required to equip the national security apparatus of the United States.

You overestimate the relevance of the USA.
It's correct that the somewhat close economic ties can export U.S. economic troubles to most of the world. But that's only a short-term effect. Few per cent of the German GDP are related to trade with the U.S., for example - and the trade is a drain on its resources, not a push to its economy.
All countries that have a positive trade balance with the U.S. are actually feeding it - they could consume their own goods or export to other nations instead. The economic should would just cause short-term adaption costs.
Nobody really depends on working for Americans for promises to pay sometime in return.

Africa and the UN actually get a lot of money from other countries than the US.

European trade with the USA is actually not so overwhelmingly large as many people suppose. Its exports are diverse, so it would be possible to consume much of it in Europe or elsewhere.
And the reference to welfare state - well, that reminds me of a stereotypic misunderstanding by Americans. We pay to steer the society a bit and to keep the poor less poor. That's actually not more expensive than to have a higher crime rate and 0.75% of the countries' population in jail.

I understand that this was directed at Schmedlap, but once again, if you dive down into the weeds of bilateral trade stats, you miss the overarching point that Steve Blair simply put - the global economy is interdependent and so no matter what you quote from bilateral trade stats, a decline in an economic powerhouse (US, EU, etc.) is going to have a ripple effect that hits all. Whether the impact is direct to the EU or indirect through impacts on China, etc., is irrelevant. The fact that the ECB coordinated with the Fed this past spring to inject huge amounts of liquidity into the financial markets demonstrates this interdependence.