The Great Figures Swindle
By: Claudio Resta
VT Condemns the ETHNIC CLEANSING OF PALESTINIANS by USA/Israel
$ 280 BILLION US TAXPAYER DOLLARS INVESTED since 1948 in US/Israeli Ethnic Cleansing and Occupation Operation; $ 150B direct “aid” and $ 130B in “Offense” contracts
Source: Embassy of Israel, Washington, D.C. and US Department of State.
How come Countries so strong and powerful as China and Russia aren’t ”rich” enough to support the demand of their systems according to World Bank figures?
Is this perhaps a form of hybrid cognitive war?
A major Asia Times article on the true size of China’s economy, which may actually be much larger than we generally think.
- China’s GDP PPP is really “only” 25% larger than that of the United States when last year:
- China generated twice as much electricity as the United States;
- it produced 12.6 times more steel and 22 times more cement;
- 26 million vehicles were sold in China, 68% more than the 15.5 million sold in the United States;
- Chinese consumers purchased 434 million smartphones, three times the 144 million sold in the United States;
- China consumes twice as much meat and eight times as much fish as the United States;
- Chinese shoppers spend twice as much on luxury goods as American shoppers;
- Chinese travelers took 620 million flights, 25% fewer than the 819 million flights taken by Americans, but Chinese travelers also took 3 billion trips on high-speed trains (and 685 million on traditional trains), significantly more than the 28 million Amtrak trips;
Somehow the $1 trillion a year that the US allocates to defense (including intelligence and Department of Energy programs) has caused the US Navy to shrink, while China’s $236 billion budget has built the largest navy in the world by number of ships.
Another thought-provoking statistic that isn’t in the article concerns international travel. In 2019, pre-Covid, Chinese people made 155 million outbound international trips
( http://xinhuanet.com/english/2020-11/11/c_139509342.htm ).
In contrast, Americans took 99.7 million trips abroad that same year
( https://trade.gov/sites/default/files/2023-10/2022%20US%20Resident%20Outbound%20Travel.pdf )
So, given all this, does this mean that the PPP (at constant prices) of China’s GDP is actually lower than reality?
The author of the original Asian Times piece writes also that looking too much at the services, tertiary sector, would lead to underestimating China’s GDP.
This is because China traditionally calculates GDP based on the material products system (MPS) of national accounts, which excludes services because it considers them necessary costs of material production rather than the creation of real value.
Services are now included in the calculation, but probably not as a proportion of US GDP.
This matters because US GDP growth is overwhelmingly driven by services…
And the author points out the artificiality of this: “As necessary services become an ever-increasing share of Western economies, their growth does not appear to result in improvements perceivable in the system.
Are living standards twice as good as they were in 2000? Taking a step back, the GDP PPP is intended to give an idea of the size of an economy that takes into account the relative difference in local prices.
To simplify, suppose we have an economy made up exclusively of sales of Big Macs: if they cost twice less in country A than in country B, but in country A as many Big Macs are sold as in country B, then their GDP PPP is the same.
And if we look at the size of the respective middle-income groups in both countries, China’s middle-income group (families earning between 100,000 and 500,000 RMB per year) was already around 400 million people in 2017, which appears to be l
It’s the last accurate number we have. for this
( https://china-briefing.com/news/china-middle-class-growth-policy-and-consumption/ ).
This compares to approximately 130 million people in the United States
( https://statista.com/chart/29889/people-aggregate-income-by-income-class/ ).
And I don’t think that people in the Chinese middle income bracket can afford things significantly less than people in the American middle income bracket, at local prices in China.
If you earn, for example, 200,000 RMB a year in China, the equivalent of about 30,000 dollars, you could for example probably live the lifestyle of someone earning 100,000 dollars a year in the US, as things are very cheaper in China, and that you get additional benefits from the state (such as free healthcare for a large part of the population).
Just look at the price of cars: cars of similar quality are in fact 3 times cheaper in China than in the United States. So there may be about 3 times more people in China able to afford middle-class-like living standards locally than Americans in the US…
Which might suggest that GDP PPP might effectively be underestimated.
In any case, it’s really inspiring. More than anything it raises the question of how we measure economies and why current GDP calculations are far from perfect.
In the Anglo West we are starting to have some doubts: do you want to see that we are the losing gang?
Even Niall Ferguson, the most fanatically pro-Western and pro-colonial historian around (the one who usually defends the British Empire):
The same goes for Russia, now the fourth World Power.
Countries with the highest military expenditure:
World 2,443
1 USA 916.0
2 China 296.0
3 Russia 109.0
Sanctions Vs Raw Materials
Original; ”when a man with a gun meets a man with a rifle, the one with the gun is a dead man.” (quoting from ”A Fistful of Dollars” 1964 spaghetti western)
paraphrase:
“When a man with sanctions meets a man with raw materials, the man with sanctions is a dead man”
Can a Country like Russia, with a nuclear arsenal comparable to that of the USA, a powerful fleet of nuclear submarines, an advanced Space Force, and Air Force and the most advanced hypersonic missile vectors, plus the necessary investments in research to develop such technologies, spend only about 1/9 of the USA budget on defence?
As well as capable of giving a hard time for two years to a coalition of Ukrainian supporters which includes not only the USA, but also the UK, France, Germany and other countries.
Is Russia’s military–industrial complex that efficient or are the related World Bank’s and others UN Agencies’ figures a fake?
Thanks to Han Feizi and Maurizio Blondet