(Also on “Roger Graf” Facebook page)
The following is a comment to an American Enterprise Institute report, “America’s inconvenient trillions”, by Derek Scissors, November 27, 2017, http://www.aei.org/publication/americas-inconvenient-trillions/.
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We’ve become so self-critical that we flagellate ourselves over the slightest thing. It doesn’t take much. Crude numbers often send us into a tizzy. There’s few things more crude than “GDP” and the “Trade Deficit”. The “Trade Deficit” has little to do with accurately measuring what we contribute to the international economy. It’s essentially meaningless. But in the mouths of our demagogues, it’s gold for their personal political fortunes.
As for “GDP”, it excludes and ham-handedly misstates much. Plus, the thing is at the mercy of a country’s politics. In communist/totalitarian countries, all numbers are creations of the state. Those states have as their prime existential motive a secular evangelism for a socialist utopia. Everything is warped, including numbers, in service to that ultimate end. So, comparing numbers between a closed and open society is lunacy.
Honest evaluations of national wealth are more helpful. Read the article, take some time to digest it, and see if you don’t agree.
The world may not be as our visible, popular, semi-literate elites – right, center, and left – would have us believe.
RogerG