The United States isn't exactly the economic doormat Donald Trump decries in his campaign rhetoric.
"Our country is in deep trouble," Trump said in Monday night's debate with Hillary Clinton.
"We are in a competition with the world, and I want America to win," he said in a speech last month. "We don't win anymore."
The U.S. economy does face serious challenges: An aging workforce, low worker productivity, still-sluggish growth, stagnant pay and a steady loss of good-paying manufacturing jobs — a loss that's brought pain to many American communities.
But the facts don't bear out Trump's assertion that the United States has become a global weakling, an economic pushover exploited by its competitors. Whether measured by its pace of expansion, job gains, financial might, global competitiveness or sheer size, the U.S. economy remains the envy of much of the developed world.
"Over the past 10 years, the U.S. has done better than pretty much any other advanced country, certainly the European competitors," says Daron Acemoglu, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Consider:
— The United States ranked third out of 140 countries in the World Economic Forum's economic competitiveness rankings, just behind Switzerland and Singapore. China comes in 28th, Japan sixth and Germany fourth. (The report evaluates countries' policies and institutions — in such areas as education, health care and finance — to see whether they make the economy more efficient and contribute to prosperity.)
— Though Trump complained Monday about America's "regulations on top of regulations," the U.S. ranked No. 7 out of 189 countries in the World Bank's "ease of doing business" survey. By contrast, China, the world's second-largest economy after the United States, was No. 84.
— The United States has outpaced other advanced nations collectively for each of the past four years and likely will do so again in 2016, according to the International Monetary Fund.
— American employers have added jobs for a record 71 consecutive months and added a robust average of 204,000 a month over the past year. Unemployment has sunk to 4.9 percent — essentially what economists call full employment. The number of Americans seeking unemployment aid has been fewer than 300,000 for 81 straight weeks. It's the longest such streak since 1970, when the labor force was only about half as big as it is now.
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