But that may be about to change. In late July, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn) and five House cosponsors introduced legislation designed to move federal agencies away from GDP and towards a metric that has been thoroughly vetted by economists, adopted by law or executive action in Maryland, Washington State and Vermont, and calculated by researchers for all 50 states — the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI).
Of course they’ll need to clean the Great Hoax out of it and probably a few other things. Guard against the Crit, but it might be a better thing.
Are you ■■■■■■■ kidding me? This is lib bull feces.
The GPI also captures the vast economic contributions from the non-market sector which GDP ignores, such as the value of volunteering, unpaid care work, modern infrastructure and protected natural areas. Unlike GDP, it factors in inequality by counting gains for those least well off more than gains for billionaires, based on well-established economic principles of declining marginal benefits of income, wealth and consumption.
Part of the problem is that they aren’t attempting to measure in constant value, or “constant dollars”, and with either inflation can help to give the appearance of growth when there may have even been contraction if things get bad.
This is an inherent problem with things like “capital gains” too because over time inflation may actually negate what appears to be gains when only looked at simplistically … the way the government does when they tax them.
Which is to say that stock market indexes also neglect inflation.
Now, if we still had times of deflation like we used to all that might not be as bad, but deflation is bad for big government spending recklessly and for big bankers / finance living off of the churn (because inflation usually lags behind the causes of it) so sustained inflation has been more or less been government policy.
