Doesn't this make it difficult to maintain that fiction?
The United States' share of world GDP has been relatively constant for the last 40 years, and is actually slightly higher in 2009 (26.7 percent) than it was in 1975 (26.3 percent).
Despite the rise of Asia, we've held our own globally. Europe, however, is the place that has taken the hit:
The EU15's share of world GDP has declined from about 36 percent of world output in 1969 to only 27 percent in 2009.
In the generation after the end of World War II, when we had about half the world's GDP by default since most of the industrialized world was smashed by that global war, it made sense that our share of the pie would decline as the rest of the world recovered from the war.
But really, just based on the statistics, we're not the one in decline. Do we really want to emulate the European Union's policies?
UPDATE: I guess there has been recent blog discussion on this topic.
