Just How Rich is the United States?

To say you have a 11.5 trillion dollar a year economy is generally meaningless to most folks...11.5 trillion is too large a number for most people to comprehend.

In order to make sense of the number I have typically resorted to comparing the US economic output to the remaining countries of the world.

The US accounts for half of the globes economic production while having only about 5% of the population...This means that the United States alone is as rich as the sum of the GDPs of all remaining 191 countries. Or conversely if the worlds population was 100 people. 5 Americans would produce as much as the remaining 95 people.

I think the link below is a better way to communicate this idea. The writer compares each of the 50 US States output to a country's GDP. It shows starkly the absolute economic primacy of the United States.

Just look at the major countries that are equal to the production of some US States.

Canada= Texas, France = California, Saudi Arabia =Tennessee, Israel = Oregon etc.

http://bigpicture.typepad.com/comments/2007/01/countries_gdp_a.html