Anyone going to the TEA PARTY Tommorow? (page 11)

BizzyBee

Puts me in mind of this:

Wal-Mart, Exxon Mobil Top Fortune 500 List
By JOHN BERMAN and CLAIRE PEDERSEN
April 15, 2010—
The Fortune 500 -- the biggest companies in America -- boosted their earnings a whopping 335 percent in the last year. It's the second biggest jump since the list began in 1955.
"It's just a staggering amount of money that big companies made in 2009 versus 2008. $330 billion more than the year before. It's just an unprecedented gain," said Andy Serwer, managing editor of Fortune magazine, which compiles an annual list of top public companies as measured by gross revenue.
But soaring profits aren't quite a reason to celebrate. Record gains for America's most profitable companies come after a year of record losses. The Fortune 500 shed 834,000 jobs last year -- the biggest cutbacks in its history.
"You can really say that the reason why these companies are doing so much better is because they fired a lot of people," Serwer said. "Unfortunately, that is the history of the big business of capitalism."

Sammie: assuming your fist post above was an attempt to answer my question on behalf of beks (and if so, thank you)--they're equating GDP with the nebulous concept "economic benefit" (which is the only x-axis label the chart itself even mentions--shameful). I'll freely admit not to being an economics expert, but most of the sensible economics explanations and policies I've read come from the Austrian school of economics, and one of that school's adherents, Frank Shostak, explained one of the key limitations of the real-world value of the GDP thus:

The GDP framework cannot tell us whether final goods and services that were produced during a particular period of time are a reflection of real wealth expansion, or a reflection of capital consumption....For instance, if a government embarks on the building of a pyramid, which adds absolutely nothing to the well-being of individuals, the GDP framework will regard this as economic growth. In reality, however, the building of the pyramid will divert real funding from wealth-generating activities, thereby stifling the production of wealth.

All these economics stimulus packages are addressing the symptom, not the root cause, of the economy's problem. Beks may well be correct in saying that 2/3rds of our national economy is consumer spending--but I think this is the root of the problem, not a necessary reality to consider and cater to when trying to come up with a solution. Thinking that we as a nation can spend our way out of a looming economic nightmare is pretty insane. The stimulus package backers (of all affiliations and during current or past administrations) are trying to restart the engine, all the while ignoring the fact that the vehicle's gone over a cliff and is in free-fall.

In this video, Peter Schiff especially explains some of these concepts really well. Please don't let the super-dramatic music turn you off, it's worth watching:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4n3g5lUgkWk

beksbks

Sorry Sammies, you're right, it's 1.73

Fenderson, the point is that the buck keep moving. Through the community. So you take your buck, and you buy a bucks worth of apples at the grocery store. That keeps the grocery store employing folks to ring up them apples. It keeps a farmer in business growing those apples, truckers who truck em, the clerk and the trucker and the grower can now have a cup of coffee or a burger etc. etc. etc. That is what our economy is. Give that dollar to a billionaire, what does he do with it? Speculates on gas or housing or pork bellies that keeps the rest of us from spending our money on that dollar that keeps things rolling.

The true meaning of "spread the wealth".

A.Fenderson

I understand your point, I think. But the stimulus packages address the symptoms and worsen the disease. Pretty soon we're going to be spreading the little green pieces of paper that no one outside the U.S. wants anything to do with, and since we don't make anywhere near as much as we buy from abroad, it's gonna be rough once no one wants to sell to the U.S.