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Politics : HOWARD DEAN -THE NEXT PRESIDENT? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (953)	12/11/2003 10:16:46 AM
From: Raymond Duray	Respond to of 3079

BUSH'S FANTASY FIGURES FOR GDP Kenneth, Thanks for the AFP link. That is pretty much as I suspected. Bush is cooking the books. Here's another article that came out shortly after the first report of 3rd Quarter results. Skepticism is what the BEA's numbers deserve, and George Ure is properly applying skepticism to government statistics which have now been reduced to elementary boosterism and cheerleading in lieu of honest analysis. Message 19462751

To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (953)	12/12/2003 4:18:14 AM
From: Raymond Duray	Respond to of 3079

14,987.....$545,523..... BIG NUMBERS, but what do they mean? Since Al Gore endorsed Howard Dean for President on Tuesday morning, the Dean campaign has 14,987 new volunteers. And another cool half million in the war chest. That's quite a feat, by anyone's standards, even a fat cat like Little Georgie Bush is scratchin' his pore lil' ol puddin' head and trying to do the math. Let's help him, shall we? Early last February, the Good Doctor Dean had a total of 432 volunteers. And about $150,000 in the war chest. deanforamerica.com So what is this tsunami that just hit us? 34 times the number of volunteers, and 3 times the money came in in the last three days than had come in in first three months of Dr. Dean's crusade to save America from the religious fundamentalist-terrorists! Are we impressed! Hell, yes! deanforamerica.com

To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (953)	12/12/2003 4:02:55 PM
From: Lizzie Tudor	Respond to of 3079

I sincerely hope the federal economists are not all as clueless as this article suggests. "The strength was in consumer durables, consumer nondurables, and business equipment - all material stuff," he said 'It's the Twilight Zone economy' . "Factory workers aren't making them, the factory sector isn't producing them, and delivery men aren't bringing them, but the goods are nevertheless ending up at your doorstep and in GDP. It's the Twilight Zone economy." Leamer said he was at a loss to explain the surge in GDP, saying the component factors of economic growth do not add up. "Since humans don't seem to be making all this stuff, you are probably thinking that it is being made by aliens from outer space working secretly in our factories during the graveyard shifts," he said in his forecast. This is so simple to understand I really don't know why economists are so confused. Applied Materials uses outsourced foreign labor to produce new designs for product. They then send those designs to china to produce the goods. The equipment in China gets moved to Singapore where it is included in a Fab. Chips get built and they wind up on US retail shelves. No US labor, not in the design, production, execution. Nonetheless, the "purchases" that applied materials makes to build the goods or whatever shows up in GDP. Since GDP means gross domestic product, they need to revise the questions they ask to get the numbers. Instead of "how many bulk purchases did you make last month", they need to ask "how much bulk purchasing did you do from US sources last month. When they do that, guess what, they'll discover we actually have a 2% GDP or thereabouts. Maybe even less. The fact that the US government is using these GDP figures to blast all over the news (in an apparent effort to make things look better than they are)- is criminal. It caused retailers to go on a buying binge for this Christmas season, thinking they were going to get a Clinton-like economy. Now they have to discount the stuff like hell and notice the retail stocks are collapsing. If there are no smart republican financial people to be had and they are creating blunders like this I think they should break down and call Robert Rubin.