Misundertaking Taiwan for China

Ben Smith and Barbara Morrill noted that Speaker Boehner criticized President Obama for failing to talk about American exceptionalism in his State of the Union speech and went on to explain exceptionalism using the terms by which the President, well, celebrated American exceptionalism in his speech. The Speaker then tried to prove American exceptionalism by asking how but by being exceptional could the US economy "still be twenty times bigger than China's."

Maybe some readers aren't convinced it's dangerous -- not just irritating -- that the third in line to the presidency believes China's economy is 20 times smaller than that of the US when the CIA last year estimated it was just one third smaller than that of the US (USD 9 trillion for China vs. USD 14 trillion for the US in 2009 on a PPP basis).

After all, that's a quibble about numbers when what matter are values, right?

But a little digging shows which economy actually was 20 times smaller than that of the US in 2009 -- USD 700 billion (PPP basis, again) compared with USD 14 trillion for the US.

Oops, it was Taiwan's.

So the staff of the third in line to the presidency are having trouble distinguishing China and Taiwan. Starting to get nervous?