Fresh gross domestic product (GDP) numbers came in, and it was a blowout. The kind of blowout that only a $2.7 trillion government deficit can buy while the private economy crumbles around it.
Another couple of blowout GDP reports like this and Americans will be living beneath an overpass.
Biden’s GDP Miracle
First the numbers. The Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) reported that GDP for the fourth quarter came in at 3.3 percent annualized. Which blew away estimates of 2.0 percent.And it brought growth for all of last year to 2.5 percent.
Which is very healthy.
On paper.
Note the numbers are preliminary, so they’re subject to revision.
Still, the regime media rolled out their finest adjectives: CNN called it “shocking”—in a good way. The New York Times called it “stunning and spectacular.”
So what’s the problem? Debt.
Your grandkids bought it all. And then some.
To see why, in the past 12 months, the federal deficit increased by $1.3 trillion. Yet we only got half that in GDP—about $600 billion.
In other words, everything else shrank.
It’s even worse for that brave and stunning Q4—there we got just $300 billion in extra GDP for—wait for it—$834 billion of new federal debt.
GDP Versus Wealth
Remember that GDP isn’t measuring wealth, it’s measuring spending—production that is sold.For example, if you dig holes and fill them, it’s GDP. In fact, you could build a missile, blow up the Golden Gate Bridge and every house within 5 miles of it, and it shows up as GDP. The missile cost money after all, and the government paid for it.
Of course, mainstream media—indeed, mainstream economics—pretends that GDP is identical to wealth. Pumping out articles celebrating GDP as prosperity.
That’s close enough when it’s private firms or individuals producing more to sell more—in that case, rising GDP means the country is getting richer. Because more stuff is being produced.
But it’s actually the opposite when it’s government spending. Because government’s job is taking wealth and lighting it on fire. That means when GDP is growing from government spending, it’s not measuring wealth.
It’s measuring dissipation of wealth at best, and destruction of wealth at worst.
Essentially, the pace at which we’re going Soviet, replacing private wealth with government waste.
So translating that brave and stunning GDP into the real world, we’re destroying wealth at rates not seen since 2008.
This actually lines up with what we’ve seen in jobs—in a recent video I mentioned that more than half of the jobs last year were actually government and government-related social service jobs.
In some states, it was literally more than all of the jobs created—in other words, the private sector is shrinking.
All these government jobs, of course, are unproductive—they’re not making us more prosperous as a society.
On the contrary, they’re taking wealth earned from productive activities and squandering it on vote-buying or worse—think of the wealth destruction contained in a single Environmental Protection Agency bureaucrat.
What’s Next
The lapdog media will keep playing along with the government statisticians and the gaslighting academics.They’ll keep trashing regular Americans for posting their grocery bills and mortgage payments, praying that they can maintain the illusion long enough for the next election.
Fortunately, there are millions of us who can see that the emperor is buck nekkid.
