Is there a Right Way to Calculate GDP + 3 More Stories 3-10-25

0.189 - 20.78 Scott Becker

This is Scott Becker with the Becker Private Equity and Business Podcast. We're really going to talk through a few different issues today, one of these being a serious issue, two of these being less serious. The first serious issue relates to government counting of GDP. And here's the issue with government counting.

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On a lot of stats, employment, for example, we counted with and without government jobs added. Inflation, we use multiple different counts for Chairman Powell to get a real good sense of where inflation is really at for ordinary people absent certain expenses. And I'm not a big fan of multiple different counting measures.

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I hate when companies do it with all different kinds of variations of EBITDA, which often leads to false counting. Now, the reality with the government is if we count GDP with and without government spending,

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This probably gives us a real and better sense, just like counting jobs, with and without government jobs, added as to whether or not the economy is really growing or whether it's been inflated due to artificial government spending. Two very different things. So in terms of this argument, do we count this without deficit spending, without federal spending?

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I don't think you have to do one or the other. I think you probably do both to get a real sense of what's really going on with the growth of our economy. We do some of it with government spending and some of counting GDP without government spending to really give yourself a real sense of this. So that's one. The second thought for the day is.

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He had a magnificent foursome the other day where David Berku of Colliers came to the rescue and were able to win a match and won big money, paid for dinner, went out big on the backs of the kid from Holland and the kid we call Philadelphia Freedom. So that was a great day on the course with David Berku coming to the rescue. The third thing is you end up in a situation sometimes

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where somebody's absent from whatever team you're a part of, whatever golf game you have, whatever match you're doing, and that is often sometimes addition by subtraction. It's accretive. So we were missing one of the regular stalwarts of the game, and I can't tell you what a pleasant afternoon it was. So I have to say sometimes there's addition by subtraction.