The Commerce Department’s GDP numbers don’t make any sense

By John Crudele

October 29, 2015 | 9:47pm

 

Marijuana must be legal in Washington because the folks at the Commerce Department have to be smoking a lot of it.
Commerce announced on Thursday that the nation’s third-quarter gross domestic product expanded by just a 1.5 percent annual rate.
That’s pathetic growth that won’t allow the US to create enough jobs for the number of people entering the workforce. It’s also less than half the second quarter’s growth.
But how Commerce got to that 1.5 percent number is truly amazing.
Of the 1.5 percent, 0.45 of a percentage point came from increased health care spending. In other words, mandatory ObamaCare payments caused about one-third of the third-quarter GDP growth.
Without that forced spending, GDP growth would have been just 1 percent annualized.
But that ain’t all.
Increases in durable-goods spending contributed 0.48 of a percentage point to that 1.5 percent GDP number. Without that increase — on products like cars, refrigerators and planes, which are long-lasting — annualized third-quarter GDP would have been just 1.02 percent.
Here’s the bizarre part: Sales of durable goods have been in a free fall.

Read the whole thing.