U.S. President Donald Trump speaks in front of posters depicting household income data in the Oval Office on August 07, 2025. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)
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There’s another scandal involving a critical government statistic on the economy.
Everyone is focused on the appalling state of how the federal government calculates job creation. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) just released drastic revisions to the number of jobs created for the 12-month period ending in March of this year. Job growth was revised down by nearly a million jobs, fewer than half the jobs originally reported. Talk about a colossal miss!
Serious questions are being raised about the reliability of other government economic data.
But there is another huge problem involving how the size of the economy, gross domestic product (GDP), is measured. The offense is not the integrity of the GDP number but that there’s a better, more comprehensive, more enlightening diagnostic tool for measuring the true health of the economy.
The scandal is that for political reasons this metric is buried by the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA). You have to dig deep to find it in the statistical bowels of this agency. The BEA refuses to release the number when it releases GDP data. Instead, you have to wait several months.
Why? Because the superior metric, Gross Output (GO), gives lie to the dogma that consumer spending drives the economy. We’re always told that consumer outlays represent 70% of total economic activity. Not true: It turns out the business sector (B2B spending) is almost twice the size of consumer spending.
B2B sales and business investment are what produce prosperity and make possible a higher standard of living. They highlight the folly of more taxes, regulations and government mandates. That’s a message a lot of politicians and economists don’t want to hear.
Don’t be put off by the awful name “Gross Output.” It actually paints a far more accurate picture of how things stand. GDP measures final sales in the economy, turning a blind eye to what goes into the making of products and services. In contrast, GO takes into account spending at all stages of production. GDP virtually ignores business-to-business sales. It’s as if supply chains don’t exist.
In the real world, that’s wrong. Consumers can’t consume unless stuff is being made and offered in the first place. Without commercial investment, enterprises can’t expand. Research and productivity wither. Incomes stagnate. Entrepreneurs can’t create and innovate.
In essence, the difference between GDP and GO is the difference between an x-ray and a CAT scan.
Eminent economist Mark Skousen, who has relentlessly pushed the importance of GO, points out that this metric not only gives a truer picture of the economy but also a better predictor of what lies ahead. He rightly asserts that GO and GDP numbers should be released at the same time, and GO should be treated as equal, if not superior, to GDP.
While many economic and political sacred cows are at stake, the clown show at the BLS provides the perfect opening for the Trump team to go for GO. This will be a political and economic revolution.