The snowplow hit our mailbox last winter. Broke the post. I went out and got a 2x4 and made a new mailbox post. The work was easier than I expected.
The other day I was looking for something in the garage. I found a 3-foot length of 2x4 left over from the mailbox repair. I kept it because... because you never know.
It occurs to me that the 2x4 I bought is a model of Gross Domestic Spending. The part of the 2x4 I used to make the post, well, that's the output, that's GDP, final spending. And the 3-foot difference, that's sort of like non-final spending.
If I had a customer that paid me for the mailbox job, my little metaphor would be more accurate. But as it is, I was the final customer. Mine was the final spending. My work was for my own satisfaction (according to the IRS) so I got no tax deductions for my spending. And my 3-foot leftover piece is just post-consumption detritus. Guess I could pay somebody to haul it to the dump, and that would add a little more to GDP.
What seems to bother most people about GDP is that it doesn't measure happiness. I think that's weird. What bothers me about GDP is that it ignores trillions of dollars of spending just because we get to subtract those trillions from our taxable income. So I invented Gross Domestic Spending (GDS).
