Here's the graph of U.S. Real GDP on a quarterly basis from 1947 through Q2:2005. Notice the jugernaut that is the U.S. economy. Second quarter growth in U.S. estimated at 3.4% annual rate! more here.

Lots of interesting comments if you sit and stare at it long enough. When did Voelker come in, when did Reagan cut taxes, when did the ADA, Clean Air Act, Gulf War I, Tax increases come in?

When I started grad school in Q3:1991 real gdp stood at 6.035 trillion. Fifteen years later the U.S. has doubled to 12.37 trillion and evidently still cranking along. In another fifteen years the U.S. will be at $25 trillion.

Short of catastrophe, the folks in Congress seem to be incapabable of really screwing things up. As long as they transfer their fifteen to twenty percent of GDP from Peter to Paul but don't monkey with incentives (i.e., marginal tax rates) things will go along swimingly. Congress people get to spend more nominal money, make more people "rich" including themselves, the rest of us are able to enjoy the good life because the incentives to cure cancer, make a better car, a bigger flash drive, or whatever the next big thing will be, are still in place.

Sitting around my office and talking, in awe, about the small picture, we made bigger pictures in STATA, but I chose not to post them because not everyone has an 18" monitor. However, even the small graph reveals that real GDP is still convex to the origin and that the Malthusians are still wrong! At least in the United States we have not reached diminishing marginal returns to human activity.

STATA data here for those who want to play (date, real gdp, nominal gdp) [original link broken - now fixed].