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Politics : Ask Michael Burke -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Skeeter Bug who wrote (66589)	8/21/1999 8:15:00 PM
From: Freedom Fighter	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 132070

Skeeter, >>wayne, the question that REALLY needs answering is why the it revolution needs to be measured in chained dollars instead of real ones. if it is so great, why isn't gdp increasing faster than 2-2.5%?<< First off, I must say that I've become suspicious of every single statistic that comes out of Washington. I don't even look at them any more other than for conversation purposes. The information is too difficult to gather and too controversial to interpret even if you are giving it an honest effort. And I don't trust them. I've read both sides of the case about chained dollars vs. real ones and I'm still thinking about it. I can appreciate that the PC I am using right now is better than the IMB "AT" I used a decade ago. Yet they cost me the same amount of money. Similarly, I would think that companies that are producing high tech items are getting more bang for the buck out of the technology they are using to produce them. So something favorable is going on that needs to be measured. At the same time I think there's a lot of stuff on my PC that I don't need and don't care about that bean counters consider as quality improvements. That includes some of the upgrades of old packages that now have functionality that about 3 people in the universe care about. The chained dollar adjustments intuitively seem very high to me. In an environment where Washington, Wall Street, and the Fed are changing the methods of measurement in what appears to be an attempt to justify things that would otherwise be quite scary, I am highly suspicious. Every change they make makes things that on the surface look bad get better. You gotta just wonder. Wayne