Rapid growth is also throwing off huge tax revenues for state and federal government. In California the legislature is fighting over what to do with a 13 billion-dollar surplus. In Washington, the debate is over how much new social spending versus tax reductions should occur. The politics of scarcity have been banished by this tidal wave of prosperity. The performance of the last few years has already caused the projected bankruptcy of the social security system to be pushed back several more years into the distant future.
International comparisons are even more revealing.
And Japan, the country that created so much anxiety for American business in the 1980 s, has not seen its industrial production increase at all since 1990. The flip side of the American success in the last decade is the abject failure of the Japanese system. There are two major factors that have led to the American success. The first is a strong pickup in the growth rate of worker productivity. Productivity is the amount of output each worker generates.