Reply #101: Well, first off, the word is 'drivel'.

[ozymandius]

But I had hoped that the discourse here would be more enlightened than dismissive name calling.

In Econ 101 GDP is expressed with the equation Y=C+I+G+N. The equation expresses consumption patterns for about everything produced in the country. It can also be manipulated, as any good stats teacher can show you, to make some things not so bad and other things much better than the ground realities.

There is an even better one; The Chicago Fed Economic Activity Index. There are five general metrics that measure economic activity, not just consumption, and each category breaks down into several more economic gauges, totaling over seventy in all. I would happily dump GDP as a metric of economic health and go for the more complicated CFEI numbers. But that, I measure, would not as easily fit into a news channel screen crawl as a basic GDP number.