printAre you able to tease apart Republican “sequesteria” from the Democratic position on the effects of a miniscule decrease in the increase in US government spending, for this year?
I can’t.
The Democrats are adamant that a cut in oink-sector spending will destroy the chances of an economic recovery and will lower GDP.
It didn’t have to happen this way, lament the Republicans. Negotiations could have produced a better honed cutting instrument.
Note that the Republicans have never made relevant points such as that, “Government spending increases unemployment because it crowds out so much private sector job creation” (Thomas J. DiLorenzo, Organized Crime: The Unvarnished Truth About Government, p. 202).
Or, as Larry Kudlow put it, “When the government spending share of GDP declines, so does the true tax burden on the economy. As a result, more resources are left in the free-market private sector, which will promote real growth.”
Ask yourself why GDP would shrink if the burden of government is reduced slightly. Why would Gross Domestic Product be affected by a threat of a reduction in the parasitical sector–the sector (government) that doesn’t produce wealth, but only consumes it?
Could this paradox be a result of the way in which GDP numbers are crunched?
Indeed.
Gross domestic product (GDP) gauges economic activity based on spending, or “consumption,” which is not what creates wealth. Production creates wealth. (Gross domestic income (GDI) is a lesser-known calculation used by the Federal Reserve to gauge economic activity based on income.)
Official GDP numbers also chart—and include—the growth of government debt. As Vox Day has explained, “GDP counts spending but doesn’t subtract debt, so it’s like saying that you’re rich because you maxed out your platinum Mastercard. Until the debt is paid back, you can’t properly count it as economic growth. And almost all of the GDP growth over the last 20 years has been nothing but debt growth.”
The GDP is a political construct, defined, tracked and manipulated by the D.C. political machine.
GDP statistically conflates the growth of debt with economic growth.
When our economic definitional building blocks are thus perverted, it becomes easy to peddle the GDP hoax. And that hoax is that a reduction in state spending and debt is also a reduction in economic growth, and that reducing debt must be avoided at all costs.
As Ayn Rand would have advised, “Check your premises.”
UPDATE (3/3): “THE SEQUESTER ISN’T REALLY THERE.” Via the fabulous EPJ: Ron Paul on the Sequester:
The Fed is minting $85 billion a month in funny-money!