Trump administration officials are planning to come up with the idea of removing government production from GDP calculations. The administration is worried that measuring GDP inclusive of government expenditure (reflecting the spending cuts) might make Mr. Trump look bad. This is the leading cause of the current debate regarding the separation of government expenditure from GDP. Defining GDP to now be ‘GDP – G’ is a genuinely terrible idea as it is going to leave out the government’s value creation in the economy and make the GDP fundamentally incomplete.

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