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

To: KyrosL who wrote (48163)	2/6/2008 3:14:24 PM
From: Cogito	Respond to of 541326

>>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. << KyrosL - You could well be right about that, and I could well be wrong. If so, I stand corrected. It's something I've heard economists say, and I was pointing out that some people believe we are calculating GDP wrong. I should have added the caveat that I really hadn't examined the numbers, and couldn't definitively come down on one side or the other. Your point about the manufacturing costs being a very small percentage of the retail value is a good one. But of course, we have to also consider the cost of raw materials and parts, which are also mostly imported. As for the off-budget items, I would also point out that the costs of long-term care for injured soldiers is not being calculated, either, since it is not incurred all at once. But if off-budget items add 1% of GDP to defense spending, then we're talking about 5% instead of 4%. And that's a delta of 25%, so it's not insignificant. I'm also not convinced that all the costs of contractors aren't being hidden in other Department budgets. The State Department budget comes to mind, and Homeland Security. - Allen