A MODEST PROPOSAL: LET'S HAVE TWO GDPS
By Arianna Huffington
Desperate to shore up its highly vulnerable economic flank, Team Bush
is
turning positively delusional.
Despite more bad news on the jobless recovery front — 129,000 fewer new
jobs in February than forecast — the White House spinmeisters are
acting
like everything is coming up roses and daffodils.
"The economy is moving in the right direction, don't let anyone tell
you
otherwise," chirped Vice President "Pollyanna" Cheney.
"Every single economic indicator that we have today is positive,"
chimed
in administration mouthpiece Rep. David "Little Mary Sunshine" Dreier.
The president himself is doing his part to spread the phony sweetness
and
light. At one of the staged-for-the-cameras "Conversations on the
Economy"
he's been holding on the campaign trail, President Bush got downright
giddy at the prospect of a Bakersfield, Calif., stock car builder
hiring
two new workers at his business.
"That's really good news," he gushed. "A lot of people are feeling
confident and optimistic about our future so they can say 'I'm going to
hire two more.' That’s confidence!" Actually, Mr. President, getting
all
worked up about two prospective jobs in a city that has a 12.8 percent
unemployment rate and has lost 4,400 jobs since you took office is
living
in a state of denial!
But no matter how many times their cheery economic projections come up
short, the Bush faithful keep pitching the GOP party line: that the
president's tax-cut-crazed policies are, as Cheney recently put it on
MSNBC, "exactly the right medicine at the right time."
Unless you're suffering from chronic unemployment syndrome. According
to
the latest estimates, almost 10 percent of American workers cannot find
a
job — large numbers of them have given up trying to find one, and many
have settled for part-time jobs with no health-care benefits.
But that doesn't seem to faze the White House. Last month, Secretary of
Labor Elaine Chao said that when it comes to the state of the U.S.
economy, "the stock market is, after all, the final arbiter." You know
working stiffs are in trouble when the secretary of labor believes that
the stock market is the end-all of our country's economic health.
When the president and his people tell you that everything in the
economy
is looking good, it's because they are looking at a highly selective
measure of our economic well-being, namely the Gross Domestic Product
(GDP).
Remember the tidal wave of good press that followed the announcement
that
the GDP has risen 8.2 percent in the third quarter of 2003? Many in the
media were ready to declare game over and hand Bush the keys to a
second
term. As we've since seen, the victory dance was as premature as that
"Mission Accomplished" banner on the USS Abraham Lincoln.
The trouble is the GDP is actually a woefully distorted and inadequate
scorecard. It is little more than a gross tally of all goods and
services
— a raw number that doesn't differentiate between transactions that add
to
the well-being of our country and those that diminish it. Thus, a
dollar
spent sending a kid to prison is just as valuable as a dollar spent
sending a kid to college.
So here is a modest proposal: Let's have two GDPs. One based on the
current model, which would reflect corporate profits, which are up 46
percent. And another that would factor in such things as joblessness;
the
inability of wages to keep up with steep increases in medical, housing
and
education costs; the 34 million Americans living in poverty; and the 43
million with no health insurance.
Taking a step in this direction, Redefining Progress, a think tank
dedicated to promoting sustainability, has developed what it calls the
Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI), an alternative measure of economic
growth that factors in close to two dozen aspects of our economic
well-being that the GDP ignores. The group's Executive Director Michel
Gelobter describes the GPI as "the GDP minus heart attacks, prison time
and clear-cut forests. But adding back in volunteerism and time people
spend with their families." Just last week the group released its
latest
GPI analysis, which found that current GDP figures overestimate the
health
of our economy by $7 trillion.
With that damning figure, maybe the Kerry campaign can finally force
the
Bushies to take off the rose-colored shades they've been hiding behind
and
allow the American people to see them for what they indisputably are:
"the
most crooked, you know, lying group I've ever seen."
© 2004 ARIANNA HUFFINGTON.
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