RUSH: Eric in Latham, New York. Hello, sir.
CALLER: Rush?
RUSH: Yes.
CALLER: Mega dittos squared.
RUSH: I appreciate that. Thank you very much, sir.
CALLER: I don’t know if you were watching this morning. I had CNBC on, and the government now has a new formula for calculating the GDP.
RUSH: Yes, we predicted this. What a prediction! We told you that they were going to revise the way they calculated GDP so as not to have to report how bad it is. This was some months ago.
CALLER: What has happened is, typically what happens is they report the number and then there’s two or three revisions. Well, the final revision had been done on the first quarter, and it was negative. It was negative 0.2. Well, with the new formula, they’ve been able to revise that, because there’s a new formula. Now it’s positive.
RUSH: Yes, I have that story right here (paper shuffling) in my formerly nicotine-stained fingers. I anticipated somebody calling about this today, and right here it is. I have it from Bloomberg, but CNBC has it too. Six of one, a half dozen to the other. The headline is (don’t go away Eric), “The GDP Rises 2.3% Second Quarter; First Quarter Revised Upwards.” He’s right. It was negative 0.9%. But now there have been revisions, and what is the new number? It’s like two point —
CALLER: It’s 2.3.
RUSH: That is second quarter growth. They reported 2.3% second quarter growth. The first quarter has been revised up. This was last year. No, the 2.1% GDP for the first quarter of last year has been revised to a negative 0.9%. New adjustment. Now I’m confused what it is. But you’re right. They’ve changed the whole formula. They announced they were going to, so the GDP is calculated a different way, so it never is portrayed to be as bad as it really is. That’s part of managing the decline and establishing the “new normal,” like the unemployment number. The same thing is happening there. They’re revising that over and over again. There’s no way it’s 5.7% unemployment right now. It’s just not possible.
CALLER: But it’s also spun as if 2.3% is good.
RUSH: Yeah.
CALLER: That’s the current number. Now wait a minute. The weather’s been good here in the second quarter.
RUSH: That’s right. They gave the weather as the excuse for the 0.9% in the first quarter.
CALLER: Shouldn’t it be 5%? Shouldn’t it be 5%, because we’ve had pretty good weather.
RUSH: It should be 5%. If we had real recovery, economic growth going on here. You’re exactly right. But this is part of defining the new normal. But here’s the Wall Street Journal: “The Worst Expansion Since World War II Was Even Weaker — The economic expansion — already the worst on record since World War II — is weaker than previously thought, according to newly revised data.
“From 2012 through 2014, the economy grew at an all-too-familiar rate of 2% annually, according to three years of revised figures the Commerce Department released Thursday. That’s a 0.3 percentage point downgrade from prior estimates,” and it will probably be downgraded, revised down again, in the coming years. But no, you’re exactly right. The regime today is reporting GDP of 2.3% as though it is glorious news.
CALLER: I think we’re going to look back on this era as the era of false numbers, because it’s got to come out some day. I mean, numbers don’t lie.
RUSH: Well, numbers lie all the time. Numbers can be made to lie. If you write the numbers, if you control the calculation, you can make the numbers whatever you want them to be, which is what is happening here. But I agree with you. You’re kind of echoing a point that I made yesterday, and that is 100 years from now Americans are going to be looking back at this era with utter shock.
They’re going to learn what was discovered going on at Planned Parenthood. They are going to read how the people in charge made excuses for what they were doing, killing babies in the womb and harvesting the organs supposedly for research. One hundred years from now people are not going to believe that that kind of thing, this kind of thing, that is routine, actually happened in this country.
If I’m wrong about that, if 100 years from now that kind of news does not shock people, then this isn’t going to be the kind of country we want to contemplate anyway. But I think it’s going to be. We always have cyclical valleys and hills and peaks and we’re definitely in a down valley right now, culturally, generationally. We’re going to recover from this. That’s the history of the country. We always do. We always have.
And at some point down the road in the future, when the people writing history today are no longer around to write it and there’s an opportunity for more objective look back, because the facts here will not be able to be erased. There’s now an alternative media, alternative history writers. So the facts of what’s being learned today, what’s happening, will always survive. I’m telling you, people will look back and, like you say, look back at the economy. They’re going to look back at — with an objective look — just how stagnant, unproductive, flat or worse, this economy was.
And they’re then going to read that the American people were gloriously in support of the administration responsible for it. And they’re going to scratch their heads and they’re not going to understand it. And hopefully it will be a learning experience that never again would people responsible for what’s happening in our country be elected and given positions of power. Sadly, that’s the thing that hasn’t been learned.