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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Cogito who wrote (48154)	2/6/2008 2:32:44 PM
From: KyrosL	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541301

Allen, you are wrong about imported products wrongly counted as part of the US GDP. This is like saying that government statisticians can't do their job, and nobody has figured it out. Only value added in the US by US workers to these products is counted -- as it should be. It just happens that most of the value add of these imported products IS generated in the US. Such as design, marketing, retailing, and last but not least US management -- the hundred million dollar compensation packages of US CEOs, Steve Job's Gulfstream, etc. This US value add is the lion's share of most imported products sold in the US. The actual Chinese contribution to most of these products, that is the manufacturing cost, is typically less than 10% of the final retail value. With respect to defense, the off budget items for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars add less than 1% of GDP to the defense budget.

To: Cogito who wrote (48154)	2/6/2008 3:41:01 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541301

If you substitute GNP for GDP, the trend doesn't change at all, and the percentages don't change a lot. I think net income from assets abroad should count, so I'd use GDP, if you think it shouldn't you could use GNP instead. The difference isn't all that great, it doesn't effect the calculation much. Our GNP is less than one percent smaller than our GDP, it would move the percentage we pay for defense by less than a twentieth of a percent. If you add the supplementals in to the budget it moves the cost from 3.x% to 4.x% of the GDP. Pick any of those adjustments and you still don't get "a lot more than 4%, (unless you think 4.3% to 5% is "a lot more" than 3.5 to 4.5%) If you calculate our GDP based on only products manufactured here, it's much lower. Well since manufacturing is only a fraction of our gross production, my response would be - Of course but so what? Calculating our GDP based only on manufactured products, is like me calculating the cost to own and run my car without factoring in my monthly payment.