Oh, the crap they try to feed us

I am taking it easy, recovering from flu, so I have the TV on to the news. A headline news item was something like "US economy doing well: GDP is up 4.5%".

I hope that everyone knows what a load of crap Gross Domestic Product (GDP) numbers are - GDP is a poor measure of economic health. If the US has to borrow even more money from foreign banks to pay for government operating expenses, that increases the GDP. Poor quality products give the GDP a double kick upwards: cheap prices promote sales and products have a short life time and must be replaced. Anyway, there are many factors that are clearly (at least in my opinion) bad for our country yet increase the GDP.

The GDP goes up every year no matter what is happening. I wish our government and the news media would stop using meaningless statistics like GDP and get real. BTW, Dave Pollard has a good writeup on this subject.

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