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Our growth rate continues to be staggering.

If you ask an economist what's driven economic growth, it's been major advances in things that mattered - the mechanization of farming, mass manufacturing, things like that. The problem is, our society is not organized around doing that.

We are not out to boast that there is so much percentage of growth per year. Our real concern is how it affects the lives of people, the future of our country.

From 1950 to 2000, the U.S. economy grew at an average rate of 3.5 percent. That generated a massive gain in real GDP per person from $16,000 to over $50,000. A huge win for the middle class.

Economic growth is necessary to keep the promise - enormously important to individual Americans - that each generation will have the opportunity to become more prosperous than the preceding one, the popular term for which is 'the American dream.'

There is more potential for economic growth in rural America than at any time in decades.

Economic growth creates jobs, and countries grow when they educate their people and pursue policies that encourage households to save, existing businesses to invest, and entrepreneurs to innovate and create new markets.

What we see today is an American economy that has boomed because of policies and developments of the 1950s and '60s: the interstate-highway system, massive funding for science and technology, a public-education system that was the envy of the world and generous immigration policies.

If we didn't have the rest of the world growing, the United States economy would be in much worse shape than it is today.

Ever since the Industrial Revolution, investments in science and technology have proved to be reliable engines of economic growth. If homegrown interest in those fields is not regenerated soon, the comfortable lifestyle to which Americans have become accustomed will draw to a rapid close.