Government Spending: Accounting and Economics
ByA Wall Street Journal story today looks at government spending through the lens of the national income and product accounts (NIPA). The article says that as government spending rises, it is “no longer dragging on growth.” Unlike recent years when spending was supposedly cut, the government today “has ceased to be a drag on growth.” But that is an unwarranted conclusion from the NIPA data, which are produced by the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA).
The BEA includes government output within overall gross domestic product (GDP). The first thing to note is that measuring government output is guesswork because most of it is not sold in the marketplace. The BEA solution “is to value government output in terms of the input costs incurred in production.” So if the government hires a worker for $80,000 to administer food stamps or impose new regulations, government “output” would rise by $80,000. That seems rather optimistic…
Government Spending: Accounting and Economics
