PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH Message Board

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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH

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To: MKTBUZZ who started this subject	9/22/2003 1:54:49 PM
From: DuckTapeSunroof	Read Replies (1) of 769670

The economy's statistical mirage: The second-quarter GDP numbers were largely mythical or misinterpreted. Half of the increase came from military spending, which makes people poorer, not richer. Another $38.4 billion was listed as spending on computers. Too bad it didn't exist: "The vast majority of computer investment never occurred," explains U.S. News & World Report article (thanks to Richard Russell for mentioning it). "Given the bizarre way government statistics are compiled, nobody actually paid anything and nobody received anything. That's because Washington measures computer investment by calculating how much it would have cost in 1996 to buy a computer of equivalent power to today's machines. On the $38.4 billion in increased computer investment, therefore only about $6 billion was real spending. The other $32 billion was a statistical construct, which is just a fancy way of saying that it wasn't real. Without that false comfort, we would have been looking at a second-quarter growth not of 3.1 percent, but of roughly 1.7 percent - and most of that attributable to defense spending. Profits tell the same story, down $31 billion from the first quarter."

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