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It’s almost like Spud doesn’t know the GDP equation

The easiest way to create growth in the UK is to redistribute wealth to those in need

Umm, yeah.

GDP = private consumption + gross private investment + government investment + government spending + (exports – imports).

The cash being invested creates growth just as much as the spending does.

We can also go further. Spud’s own analysis is that we’ve an excess of demand over supply – that’s the inflation. So, he recommends taking the money off those who might expend supply and using it to expand demand.

Erm, right.

11 thoughts on “It’s almost like Spud doesn’t know the GDP equation”

  1. gross private investment + government investment
    Whaaat?
    That’s like saying A+A. Usually written as 2A
    If we’re doing pseudo maths why not stick a cosine in?

  2. Bloke in North Dorset

    bis,

    It’s the Blair and Brown deception, picked up by the the left, that all government spending is “investment”.

  3. Candidly, I wonder if he has any ex-professors and coulda-been lords in mind for needing this wealth redistribution lark.

  4. Literally 4 days ago he approvingly shared a link to an IMF study which showed that changes in the level of inequality from tax changes on the rich did not affect GDP growth.
    The IMF economists came up with evidence too, would you believe it, data to support the null result.
    Today the Spudcum College sponsored by P3 Pizza (motto: deliver where China won’t go) approve the opposite message.

  5. Can you impute me now?

    Isn’t the GDP equation just entirely in economists heads? I.e. is over half of it made up?

  6. @BiND
    I wouldn’t mind seeing a redefinition of the word “investment” in economics to the presumption that it is intended to produce a return & the principle is recoverable.

    When I was running a business I could have said I was “investing” in new plant. But of course I wasn’t investing. I bought the bloody plant & paid for the needed changes to the workplace & the installation. Maybe it was a good decision & we made money out of utilising it. Or it could have been a poor decision & the whole exercise was a waste of money with little to be recovered by trying to flog it on. But it was spending. No different from the spending was done paying the electricity bill. You can run up an electricity bill without actually benefiting from it. Does that make it investment?

  7. In GDP accounting “investment” is things that are accounted for over more than one accounting period. So, things that are depreciated rather than written off as cash costs. That has its own problems too but that’s what it is.

  8. It’s particularly egregious in the case of ‘government investment’ because government’s rarely have resources to “invest”. It’s just a spending commitment on future revenue.

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