OF COURSE, IT IS OBVIOUS WE NEED THE NERDS AT NSA TO DO SOMETHING MORE PRODUCTIVE ... LIKE COME UP WITH A MEANINGFUL GDP QUICKLY ...: While no one will ever be nostalgic for a way of measuring economic activity, there’s no question that our current compilation of GDP is ridiculously out of date. This statistic was developed in the late 1920s and early 1930s to measure a very narrow slice of life – production. This time frame included the start of the Great Depression when business leaders and politicians greatly underestimated the contraction in the economy, so there was a desperate need for better information. GDP – estimating the change in business spending, consumer spending, government spending, and exports minus imports – fit the bill and was a great advancement in understanding the economy. The government would gather information on spending over the course of several months, develop an average, compare it to the prior period, and voila! Suddenly we had a yardstick that we could use to measure the growth or contraction of economic activity. Unfortunately, over the last 80 years we’ve changed woefully little about how we calculate this number. Yes, the government has tinkered with GDP, adding in a measurement of “rent you could receive if you rented out your home” and other silly things. Yes, the government makes adjustments for how big of an affect different purchases have on our productivity (new computers add more to the economy than their cost… see if you can figure that one out!). But in terms of simply measuring numbers, the government waits around for survey results, compiles some averages over an entire calendar quarter, and then revises the number twice over the following two months. To find out what happened in the first quarter of the year, you have to wait until the last Friday in June for a final, revised number from the U.S. government. Haven’t they heard of the Internet? If we can determine iPhone sales in a matter of hours, and Black Friday retail sales within a week, then why does it take three months to develop an average of data from a calendar quarter? ------------------- OBVIOUSLY IT IS BECAUSE OF THE SAME INEPT DUMB ASSES WHO BUILT THE OBAMACARE WEBSITE OR MORE LIKE THEM ....
Posted on: Fri, 01 Nov 2013 07:34:55 +0000
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