- cross-posted to:
- usa@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- usa@lemmy.ml
The concept is called “imputations” — which are “what if” scenarios.
Example: When a person buys a home, the gov adds that person’s imaginary rent to the GDP!
That is, if he didn’t buy a home, he would have spent X dollars on rent. There are two more shenanigans like that you can read in the article.
By this measure, China has already caught up with the US a long time ago.
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Lol yeah the bean counters needed a way to make America look good so they came up with the idea that homeowners are their own tenants and pay imaginary rent to themselves. They also include healthcare costs in GDP so when a pharma corp charges you 30x more for meds, that’s good for the economy!!
The US cooks the books on everything it does so it’s hard to judge how bad things are truly going, but it means a lot that China’s real numbers are comparable to the bs American stats.
Oh yeah, just look how they change the way they calculate inflation and how they changed the definition of recession. lol
With Europe it must be some 60% that is fake. Probably more.
Way more than that.
Here’s a really good breakdown, it’s 66% fake according to this
https://www.unz.com/lromanoff/us-economic-statistics-unreliable-numbers/
oh my
Lol it’s way more than 15%
15% is the number they allow you to see.
Only 15%? Those are rookie numbers. They should be accounting for the what if scenario of every renter in the US renting 4 separate houses at once, and add that to GDP!
More like 2/3 at least
https://www.unz.com/lromanoff/us-economic-statistics-unreliable-numbers/
That’s no joke, though: the renter pays (1) their own rent (2) the landlord’s mortgage (3) the landlord’s rent and (4) the bank’s owner’s rent. I don’t have the savvy to work out who lives off the renter’s property taxes if they pay those.
