Ive been following the numbers for quite a few years, and it seems to an uneducated eye, like mine, that the government fiddles with the stat’s until GDP comes out to between %2 and %5 and inflation comes out between %1 and %3. No matter what happens in the ‘real world’ we live in.
Ive read the many arguments above about “we just don’t understand what the numbers really mean”, but I can’t buy it. Real inflation is much higher than the reported numbers, maybe not as high as the Williams numbers, but definitely closer than further. And, its very, very difficult to believe that the USA could move millions of 30 or 40 dollar an hour jobs offshore, and no matter what junky unsafe products we get back, end up with a growing GDP. It doesn’t make ‘common sense’.
Those people that lost those high paying jobs, now working at Home Depot, and Wall Mart, can’t buy much of the junk we import. You can fudge the numbers for a long time, as we have, but eventually (now?) you have to come to the conclusion, no matter what the fudged numbers show, that we’ve been shrinking our GDP, in real terms, for a very long time. Of course, you can always come up with a case or two to support (weakly) any argument to the contrary.
