I Try to Be Good. I Try So Hard. But It Is So Very Difficult...
T.B. Lee asks:
Twitter / @binarybits: Why is @mercatus publishin ...: "@binarybits Timothy B. Lee
Why is @mercatus publishing obvious nonsense? http://t.co/suMWnSTn The economy is not shrinking at 5% a year.
Indeed:
Twitter: "
mercatus Mercatus Center
Is the current inflation rate 2.5% or 11.2%?: ow.ly/78F8I
in reply to @mercatus ↑
@ModeledBehavior Modeled Behavior
You're better than this, Mercatus Center RT @mercatus Is the current inflation rate 2.5% or 11.2%?: http://ow.ly/78F8I
I have one quibble: @ModeledBehavior. They are not "better than this". That is who they are. That is what they do.
As with so much of what is going on today, people who want to be "on the right" have to first disable their basic bullshit filter in order to fit the role they have chosen to fill.
Anthony B. Sanders | Oct 24, 2011 | Mercatus Center Senior Scholar
Macroeconomic Measuring May Obscure True GDP Growth, House Prices | Mercatus: This will be a busy week for economic and housing reporting. In a nutshell, most economic indicators are positive. This is indeed good news, but with one cautionary note: as I’ve noted previously, if we apply the alternate CPI measure as a deflator, real GDP growth is actually negative.
This is because the inflation deflator used by the federal government is very low.
According to Shadow Government Statistics, the inflation rate was actually 11.21% (compared to the implied inflation of 2.57% used by the U.S. Department of Commerce (Bureau of Economic Analysis).That means the +2.5 ‘real GDP growth’ estimate is actually -5.5% ‘real GDP growth’ when accounting for the old-fashioned inflation measure.
Look at ‘real GDP’ using SGS inflation. 2011’s second quarter real GDP growth was -7.23%, not 1.33% using the conservative inflation measure…
