The Bunny just sent me another op-ed from the NYT. can we discuss this for a minute?

is this maybe a tad alarmist? i would think that if you are measuring an obtuse subject (like "US Dominance"),  you might use an obtuse metric (like the GDP), instead of just rattling off a list of shortcomings. i know the dollar is losing ground, but we've got the largest domestic production value on the planet by a multiple of 3, and we've also got the most diversified economy and (despite what a growing number of crazy assholes think) a very market-friendly government structure. how about trending over a few decades? comparing similar economies?

i love it how everyone is ringing the death-knell for the US because of groups of non-diversified, mildly unstable, and relatively newly reborn economies around the world. i mean, have we looked at the BRIC countries? Brazil, Russia, India, China. Lula is dealing with the poor (which, by the way, is not where you invest for growth), Medvedev is going to be attempting to cut the puppet strings for his entire term, India is alot like the US... if this were 50 years ago and the US were in Asia... and Jaibao is doing a very good job of trying to build a market friendly economy while still operating as A COMMUNIST GOVERNMENT!

(if Jaibao can make a thorough market economy thriving AND stable for a few cycles under communist control, it will be the talk of economists for centuries. but until then, it's still CHINA, people.)

(but what's China's latest idea? getting into passenger airplane manufacturing. great. way to pick a stable growth market with lots of competitors and no barriers to entry that the Chinese market has been dying for... oh wait... what i meant to write was: exactly the opposite of everything i just wrote.)

as for oil, the market will bear what the market will bear. everyone was screaming that the sky was falling when "someday oil will be at $100 a barrel." well, here we are. and as i look out the window right now, i'm not noticing any riots. we are not going to consume oil for the next ten years the way we have the last ten. the bell is tolling right now for oil consumers who's auto technology is old and the auto owners numbers are going up (China, India, and coming up third, plucky little Cuba.) they are trying like hell to make dubai a financial center right now because they know that a single-track economy is not for the long haul. you can look at the past, but you can't really trend the future that far. will oil reach $200 a barrel? maybe. will it cause the US to turn into a 30M square mile Detroit? probably not. i mean, this guy wanted an effective energy policy on September 12, 2001. guess what, Punky? if we decided to kick oil companies in the cubes seven years ago so that we could become more isolationist, it's like drinking your own urine: it's not a sustainable model.

and guess what else, jackass? we thrive on competition. you know why our economy is heading towards stagflation? because we haven't had any quality competition in major global sectors for a few decades. sure, london is becoming the financial market to beat now, but we needed another kick in the pants. i'm excited for america, mutherfuker. competition is what it needs.

$12 trillion GDP. that's all i'm sayin'.