Here’s something I sure didn’t know, from Business Week’s Michael Mandel: What the government calls “personal consumption” is actually a grab bag of items, some of which don’t really fit the usual notion of consumer spending. For example, the nation’s current annual personal consumption of $10 trillion includes about $1.8 trillion in outlays by Medicare, [...]
My new column is online here and in the issue of Time with Barack Obama’s mama on the cover. It begins: On the last day of April, the folks at the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis will announce how much they think the U.S. economy grew–or didn’t–in the first quarter of this year. This [...]
