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Politics : Stockman Scott's Political Debate Porch -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mike M2 who wrote (28783)	9/25/2003 12:04:08 PM
From: Freedom Fighter	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 89467

Mike, This is someone else's work. bea.gov Table 3 shows Richebacher's numbers. "Computers and peripheral equipment" shows current dollars going from 76.3b in Q1 to 82.6b in Q2 while "chained dollars" grow from 319.1b to 357.5b. Richebacher says Computers and Peripherals thus comprised 38.4b of Q2's reported 73.5b GDP growth. He goes on to say 32b of that growth is hedonic fiction. Richebacher is dead wrong. He ignores the note at the end of Table 3: Users are cautioned that particularly for components that exhibit rapid change in prices relative to other prices in the economy, the chained-dollar estimates should not be used to measure the component's relative importance or its contribution to the growth rate of more aggregate series. For accurate estimates of the contributions to percent changes in real GDP, use table 2. And, in fact, casual analysis of Table 3 shows that while you can add up the columns in current dollar you CANNOT do this with the chained data. There is obviously some sort of additional scaling applied to the chained data. Cutting to the chase, Table 8.2 in the NIPA tables: bea.gov =2002&LastYear=2003&Freq=Qtr shows that Computers and Peripheral Equipment contributed 0.34% to real GDP growth in Q2. That's about $8b. Higher than the nominal $6b, but nowhere near Richebacher's absurd $38b.