CROSSPOST: NOAH SMITH: JD Vance's War on GDP Is Wrong & Bad
Noah's subhead: "Making Americans poorer won't make our society better..." What JD Vance is really trying to do is to make war on prosperity...
Why is JD Vance trying to make war on prosperity? Because the Vance-Trump policy agenda he has been one of the principal architects of is, as it was clear from the get-go, a miserable failure in terms of making a middle-class American lifestyle more affordable. It is about distracting people from the fact that nativism and protectionism make America smaller, poorer, meaner, and globally disrespected; and that Vance-Trump policies have other benefits, apparently because by removing creature comforts you remove the possibility that such creature comforts might somehow kill America’s soul. The New Right, Noah Smith correctly says, has mastered the denunciation of modernity—but has no idea of what might constitute a not-completely-unworkable destructive alternative…
If you want to understand what the “New Right” is really trying to do to American political economy, you could do much worse than to start with its surprisingly bitter little war on GDP it has launched.
Noah Smith here is not just defending a statistical construct. He is X‑raying a reactionary project. That reactionary project wants to make Americans poorer, more closed, and less free, while pretending that this somehow serves “community” and “spiritual” values.
Noah does three useful things at once:
First, he reminds us what GDP actually is: a crude but indispensable way of keeping track of how much useful stuff an economy produces.
Second, he shows how JD Vance cherry‑picks all the familiar complaints about GDP’s blind spots—quality of life, unpaid care work, social connection—and then uses them to smuggle in a completely different agenda: protectionism, nativism, and a generalized hostility to economics as a discipline.
Third, he brings in history and cross‑country evidence to make the simple but oddly neglected point that richer societies are not, in practice, less communal or more spiritually empty; they are merely (“merely”!) modern, with all the ambiguities that entails.
GDP doesn’t measure love, community, or the beauty of our poetry—as Noah Smith freely admits and emphasizes. But while wealth is not civilization, it creates the elbow room and the collective societal power necessary for even the possibility of civilization. Economists, far from being the Vancean enemies of civilization he calls them, are the guardians of civilization’s possibility.
The single most important takeaway, in one phrase: making America poorer is not a social‑conservative strategy for creating a better America:
<https://www.:.blog/p/jd-vances-crusade-against-gdp-is> <https://www.noahpinion.blog/>
CROSSPOST: NOAH SMITH: JD Vance’s War on GDP Is Wrong & Bad
Jul 07, 2026
“Her belly may be full, but her spirit will be empty.” — Captain Picard
Usually, these “GDP is actually good” posts start with a big disclaimer — an acknowledgement of all the things GDP doesn’t measure, all the reasons that measuring GDP is an inexact science, and all the ways that we need to improve society other than just making the GDP line go up. If you want a standard wonky explanation of why GDP is a useful number, here’s one that I wrote four years ago:
Four reasons why GDP is a useful number
Today I’m going to do something a little different. I’m going to tell you what I think the debate over GDP is really about.
Free trade usually raises GDP. Immigration, done right, raises GDP.1 Rightists in America want less free trade and less immigration. But every time they propose restricting trade and immigration, someone — either libertarian business/econ types on their own side, or moderate liberals on the other side — says “That will make America poorer!”. So they want some way to neutralize this objection, so they can do things that will, in fact, make America poorer.
So America’s right borrowed an argument from the European left. The European left favors degrowth, and another term for degrowth is “making GDP go down on purpose”. So naturally, they’re always trying to find reasons to denigrate GDP as a metric of human flourishing (see here, here, and here for examples). The American right is simply tweaking these arguments to make them more appealing to their own base.
JD Vance, who has emerged as the consensus leader of the New Right, makes a bunch of these anti-GDP arguments in his new book. For example, he uses the example of Japan to point out that unobserved quality differences in non-traded products can make it difficult to compare GDP across countries:
If you’re focused on GDP, a $6 pint of Japanese strawberries is no different from a $6 pint of American strawberries. If you’re focused on dollars and cents, each contributes equally to the economic indicators. But if everyone in Japan eats better strawberries than everyone in America, the economic indicators have failed to measure something meaningful…
This is actually a good argument, and I’ve made it myself many times in the past. I’m in Japan right now, and there actually are a lot of little things that make Japanese products and services a bit nicer than their American counterparts — clean tables at Starbucks, slightly better-tasting food, and so on. Economists who try to adjust for quality differences end up catching some of these things, but probably miss most of them. That ends up creating a problem for GDP comparisons between countries. And it’s only one of many such problems. Comparing lifestyles in countries where life is very different is just a difficult thing to do.
But instead of simply noting that economics is hard, JD Vance uses this good argument as a reason to bash the entire field of economics:
When I got back home, a friend asked me if I learned anything on my trip to Japan. “Yes,” I replied snidely. “Maybe economics is just fake”…
When you read some of Vance’s other arguments against GDP, his agenda becomes clearer:
[A]s the decline of Christianity has left us without a shared moral language, economics has stepped into the vacuum. We pretend there are scientific answers to questions of values. Take one of the major issues of the 2024 campaign and a significant focus of our time in the White House: Should our trade policy be oriented around protecting domestic industries and jobs or around ensuring a short-term supply of cheap consumer goods?…
This idea — that economists urge values of base consumerism on society, and ignore other moral considerations — is common in European leftist discourse. But instead of urging us to care more about inequality, power, and so on, as European leftists do, Vance wants us to care more about spiritual elevation, morality, community — i.e., things that the American right cares about. He goes on to write:
[W]e now live in a society almost blinded to considerations outside of the economic. This way of thinking is inherently opposed to the Christian way, which demands more focus on people…Take, for instance, the time we spend with our children…Domestic labor—that done by moms and dads—if unpaid, is uncounted in measures like GDP. When I leave work to spend time with my children, when I cook them dinner or argue with them about eating their carrots, I am engaged in economically unproductive work. No money changes hands, so it doesn’t show up in our national figures. By contrast, if I left for dinner at 6 p.m. and returned to work until midnight while paying a total stranger to look after my kid, my contribution to GDP would be much higher…
and:
If you step away from the glory of economic statistics, so much of American life has gone wrong. An influx of prescription opioids became a flood of synthetic opioids, which has led to tens of thousands of deaths each year and a declining life expectancy among a substantial portion of our society. We have made great progress on reducing infant mortality, but we send our children into a world—even in the physical security of their own homes—that bombards them with images and influences that have left them isolated, depressed, and increasingly at risk of self-harm. We are more disconnected, lonely, and isolated, even in the midst of historic levels of material comfort.
All this economic abundance coexists with intense spiritual misery. We orient people toward a life of consumption. We tell them to find meaning in the home they buy, the money they earn, the prestige of their job. We bombard them with all manner of creature comforts, and add their consumption—price club mega-size junk—to our national GDP. We use that GDP as a yardstick for our broader society, which is why it’s possible for false prophet economists to argue the American Dream is healthy even as suicide and addiction rates soar and the laughter of children fades from our streets…
Some of these arguments are — in my opinion — reasonable. A culture of overwork can boost GDP, at least in the short term, at the expense of quality time with family. This is actually a common argument of the center-left, which is why liberals have long fought — often successfully — for more paid family leave and other policies that reduce GDP slightly in exchange for more quality time with family. Whether this has increased birth rates isn’t clear — the evidence is very mixed — but it’s a very popular policy.
Other arguments are clearly mistaken. Over-prescription of opioids has clearly reduced GDP, by a massive amount. Yes, selling a bunch of opioid painkillers to Americans raises GDP by a few billion dollars, but this is vastly outweighed by the trillions of dollars of GDP that we lose from having a bunch more people addicted to painkillers, heroin, and fentanyl. Here’s the Philadelphia Fed in 2023:
There is growing evidence that the opioid epidemic has harmed many aspects of the real economy, including the labor market, consumer finance, and municipal finance. According to analyses from the Council of Economic Advisers’ 2019 report, the annual (nominal) economic cost of the opioid epidemic, including the cost of lives lost, is estimated at about $700 billion (roughly 3.4 percent of GDP) in 2018 alone, and over $2.5 trillion from 2015 to 2018. [emphasis mine]…
So if you care about GDP, you should view curbing opioid and opiate abuse as a huge priority! Vance is simply not thinking about this very clearly.
But Vance’s real problem is that he conflates correlation with causation. In words that could have come straight from the mouth of a European degrowther, he rails against “creature comforts”, “consumption”, and “price club mega-size junk”. But nowhere does he explain why depriving Americans of these creature comforts would give them closer-knit families, a stronger sense of morality, stronger communities, reduced loneliness, and so on.
Why would taking away Americans’ large houses, SUVs, big-screen TVs, or central air conditioning make them spiritually richer? Modern Europe — which JD Vance spends much of his time railing against — lacks most of these things. And yet America has higher fertility rates than Europe, we go to church much more, and we have a much more robust social conservative movement. Europe has also been far more restrictive of speech that criticizes Islam, as Vance repeatedly notes. Yes, America has been trending away from social conservatism and Christianity in recent decades, but so has Europe, and the gap remains. Other developed countries in East Asia — most of which are moderately poorer than the U.S. in GDP terms — are extremely secular.
What about America’s past? We were much poorer in the 1950s, yet we went to church a lot more, had larger families, and so on. If you took away the material gains we’ve made since then, would we go back to tradwives and bowling leagues and lawn parties and Sunday church and 4 kids per family?
Perhaps, but it’s doubtful. Remember that the 1950s and 1960s were the culmination of a long upswing of community, religiosity, and so on in American society — something the sociologist Robert Putnam has documented extensively. Church attendance rose:
Fertility was on the upswing too:
And if you believe Putnam’s numbers, social solidarity increased all throughout the early 20th century:
It’s important to remember that this all came during the most robust and rapid period of GDP growth that America has ever seen. Over the period in which our social solidarity was soaring, our GDP per capita nearly tripled:
It was during this time that Americans got many of the “creature comforts” that Vance despises — the single-family homes, the cars, the televisions, the lawns, and so on. The image of that material prosperity, depicted in glossy ads and paintings from the time, is a powerful part of 1950s nostalgia.
In fact, many economists argue that one big cause of the Baby Boom was the fact that economic growth — bigger houses, better medical care, new labor-saving devices like washing machines, refrigerators, and vacuums, and so on — made it easier and cheaper to raise kids. This is from a relevant Works in Progress article by Anvar Sarygulov & Phoebe Arslanagic-Little:
Parenthood rapidly became much easier and safer between the 1930s and 1950s. The spread of labour-saving devices in the home such as washing machines and fridges made raising children easier; improvements in medicine making childbirth safer; and easier access to housing made it cheaper to house larger families…
[H]ousehold electrification paved the way for other technologies, including home refrigeration…By the 1940s, electric washing machines were becoming normal in middle class homes…Between 1936 and 1956, America’s maternal death rate fell by 94 percent, from 51 deaths per 10,000 live births to under 3…[M]edical advances, which were being made across the West, radically reduced the most serious potential cost faced by prospective mothers: life itself…
Alongside strides forward in household and medical technology…[I]t became easier to secure a home in which to raise children. The number of houses built soared across the West after World War Two…This house-building bonanza led to sharp rises in homeownership rates.
The golden thread linking the phenomena that comprise the triple mechanism we describe above – advances in household technology, progress in medical technology, and easier access to housing – is that they together sharply reduced the cost of having children. [emphasis mine]…
If you like the kind of society we had in 1960, you can’t ignore the story of how we got to 1960. The answer was “economic growth”. This, combined with the examples of Europe and Asia, is why there’s no reason to believe that forcing Americans to be poorer — taking away the “creature comforts” Vance despises — would lead us to suddenly rediscover the value of community, family, and religion.
Now it’s worth noting that if you were to decrease America’s GDP to poor-country levels — below $15,000 per person, as opposed to over $90,000 today — you might be able to raise fertility. That’s how low you have to go before most countries have fertility above replacement level:
Countries with a basically pre-modern standard of living — where many women can’t read or write, and infant mortality is so high that families have to have many kids as a form of insurance — tend to have above-replacement fertility (though some don’t). But even this law is weakening, as fertility rates in Sub-Saharan Africa plunge, so even that extreme level of GDP reduction would probably fail to restore high fertility over the long run. Also, I kind of doubt that JD Vance wants to force Americans to live lives similar to those lived in Sub-Saharan Africa.
What about JD Vance’s preferred policies — trade protectionism and immigration reduction? Would those restore American community, family, and religion, at the expense of a bit of GDP? As I said earlier, that’s actually what I think this whole debate is really about.
On trade, you’ve seen Trump explicitly make the argument that Americans are going to need to suffer a bit of material deprivation in order to achieve the administration’s goals:
But how will doing this restore community, family, etc.? Presumably you could make an argument that protectionism will bring back good manufacturing jobs, which will then give men the confidence and social standing they need to get married and have kids. There’s just one big problem with this, though: Trump’s trade policy doesn’t actually increase the number of good manufacturing jobs. We’ve lost manufacturing jobs since Trump took office last year!
In fact, Trump’s tariffs are hurting the U.S. manufacturing sector, by raising the cost of intermediate goods. Economists understand this pretty well; JD Vance, who thinks “economics is just fake”, does not seem to understand it.
How about immigration? Rightists will endlessly cite Robert Putnam’s finding that diversity reduces social trust in American communities. But as Bryan Caplan and many others have pointed out, the effect size is tiny — in Putnam’s research, going from zero diversity to maximum diversity reduces social trust by the equivalent of 1 point on a 100-point scale. This suggests that all the mass deportations in the world won’t move the needle on American community and togetherness.
In other words, JD Vance’s crusade against GDP is a cargo cult. Sure, GDP doesn’t measure “the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages,” to use Robert F. Kennedy’s famous words. But that doesn’t mean that making Americans poorer will make their poetry more beautiful or their marriages stronger. Nor does it mean that policies that also happen to make us a bit poorer, like immigration reduction or tariffs, are any more likely to strengthen our society.
In a famous episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation — my favorite TV show of all time — Captain Picard castigates an alien for turning his society into a fascist empire. When the alien responds that the fascist government’s forced modernization program raised his daughter out of poverty, Picard responds with the beautiful quote at the top of this post: “Her belly may be full, but her spirit will be empty.” But was Picard arguing that it was the full bellies themselves that emptied the people’s spirits? Was he merely arguing that the fascist empire ought to become a poorer fascist empire, in order to restore the virtue of the people? Only a fool would think so.
Look, I also want America to have a stronger society. I want us to have more kids. I want us to have more stable families. I want us to have closer-knit communities, better moral values, etc. But that doesn’t mean the New Right knows how to get us there. So far, the New Right has built nothing — no new community organizations or institutions, no religious revival, nothing that would knit our society together. It has merely thrashed and thrashed against modernity, with no plan for a replacement. JD Vance’s crusade against GDP is simply more of the same.
<https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/jd-vances-crusade-against-gdp-is> <https://www.noahpinion.blog/>
Brad DeLong here, back again: Trade barriers and immigration restrictions
fail to deliver better jobs, stronger families, or higher birth rates; and yet somehow Vance-Trump (as opposed to all the other chaos-monkey versions of chaos-monkey Trump singing in the chaos-monkey choir)":
Step back: There is a seductive quality to the current “postliberal” project, primarily because it presents itself as a critique of modernity that we are all, in some small way, inclined to accept. Loneliness epidemic, opioid crisis, bowling alone—you can argue that liberal modernity has traded “spiritual elevation” for “price club mega-size junk.” And it can become a compelling narrative. If only we would face real challenges, we could then work together to surmount them, and so become better people. And then we look back with rose-colored glasses.
John Holbo and Belle Waring had the decisive counters to this in what I still think are the Best Weblog Posts EVAR:
John Holbo:
John Holbo (2004): Dead Right <https://web.archive.org/web/20040607212104/https://examinedlife.typepad.com/johnbelle/2003/11/dead_right.html>: ‘Frum’s conception of liberals as unhappy until there’s a paroled murderer and UN bluehelmet on every corner—is subject to doubt. But we pass over in silence; the man, to his credit, does not mince words about the faults of his party…. I was genuinely curious what Frum thinks conservatism looks like in all its glorious and unalloyed philosophical ideal purity…. Economic inefficiency isn’t what ‘offends’… after all, at least not Frum: “The great, overwhelming fact of a capitalist economy is risk. Everyone is at constant risk of the loss of his job, or of the destruction of his business by a competitor, or of the crash of his investment portfolio. Risk… disciplines… and teaches them self-control. Without a safety net, people won’t try to vault across the big top. Social security, student loans, and other government programs make it far less catastrophic than it used to be for middle-class people to dissolve their families. Without welfare and food stamps, poor people would cling harder to working-class respectability than they do not...” The thing that makes capitalism good, apparently, is not that it generates wealth more efficiently than other known economic engines. No, the thing that makes capitalism good is that, by forcing people to live precarious lives, it causes them to live in fear….
[But] surely Frum is at most guilty of insufficiently vigorous advocacy of prosperity. He can’t be expressly advocating the lack thereof. Oddly, there are various strong hints that he is. Example…. “William Bennett in his lectures reads admiringly from an account of the Donner party written by a survivor that tells the story in spare, stoic style. He puts the letter down and asks incredulously, ‘Where did those people go?’ But if you believe that early Americans possessed a fortitude that present-day Americans lack, and if you think the loss is an important one, then you have to think hard about why that fortitude disappeared…. It is socials that form character, as another conservative hero, Alexis de Tocqueville, demonstrated, and if our characters are now less virtuous than formerly, we must identify in what way our social conditions have changed in order to understand why. Of course there have been hundreds of such changes.… But the expansion of government is the only one we can do anything about. All of these changes have had the same effect: the emancipation of the individual appetite from restrictions imposed on it by limited resources, or religious dread, or community disapproval, or the risk of disease or personal catastophe…”.
Words fail me; links not much better. The Donner party? Where did all these people go? Into each other, to a dismaying extent…. Stoical endurance… in the face of almost unimaginable suffering is indeed moving…. But it is by no means obvious—some further demonstration would seem in order—that lawmakers and formulators of public policy should therefore make concerted efforts to emulate the Donner’s dire circumstances….
Let me step back and make quite clear: I don’t actually think Frum… is actually advocating the intentional infliction of dire economic hardship and suffering—let alone cannibalism—on the American people for the sake of hardening them up, stiffening the national spine. I think if there were some Americans caught in the snowy mountains these days, he’d advocating sending in the helicopters and so forth—and he wouldn’t order them to stand off, just filming the poor schmucks eating each other for Frum’s subsequent viewing pleasure and moral edification. Which is to say: Frum is not thinking about what he’s saying. Because what he is saying more or less instantaneously implies an indefinitely large cloud of things he really—really, really—doesn’t think…
And Belle Waring:
Bell Waring (2004): If Wishes Were Horses, Beggars Would Ride—A Pony! <https://web.archive.org/web/20040610170045/http://examinedlife.typepad.com/johnbelle/2004/03/if_wishes_were_.html>: ‘think Matthew Yglesias’ response to Josh Chafetz’ exercise in wishful thinking was about right, even if Brad DeLong’s is more nuanced…. Wshes are totally free. It’s like when you can’t decide whether to daydream about being a famous Hollywood star or having amazing magical powers. Why not—be a famous Hollywood star with amazing magical powers? Along these lines, John has developed an infallible way to improve any public policy wishes. You just wish for the thing, plus, wish that everyone would have their own pony! So, in Chafetz’ case, he should not only wish that Bush would say a lot of good things about democracy-building and fighting terrorism in a speech written for him by a smart person, he should also wish that Bush should actually mean the things he says and enact policies which reflect this, and he should wish that everyone gets a pony. See?
John came up with this “and a pony” scheme during a discussion we were having about crazy libertarians. (He was bathing Zoë as I told him about the article I’d read, and Zoë chimed in that she wanted to get a pony too. Duly noted.) Reason recently published a debate held at its 35th anniversary banquet. The flavor of this discussion is indescribable. In its total estrangement from our political and social life today, its wilfull disregard of all known facts about human nature, it resembles nothing so much as a debate over some fine procedural point of end-stage communism, after the state has withered away….
Richard A. Epstein: even in the libertarian utopia, some forms of state coercion will be required. If we must assemble 100 plots of land to build a railway which will benefit all, and only 99 owners will sell, then we may need to force a lone holdout to accept a fair price for his land. Similarly, the public enforcement of private rights and the creation of infrastructure will require money, so there will have to be some taxes. [Note to self: no shit, Sherlock.]
Randy Barnett: Not so fast! Let’s cross that bridge when we come to it rather than restricting liberty in advance. We’ll know a lot more about human liberty in the libertarian utopia, and private entrepreneurs will solve these problems somehow… look it’s Halley’s Comet!…
Now, everyone close your eyes and try to imagine a private, profit-making rights-enforcement organization which does not resemble the mafia, a street gang, those pesky fire-fighters/arsonists/looters who used to provide such “services” in old New York and Tokyo, medieval tax-farmers, or a Lendu militia…. Now try it the wishful thinking way. Just wish that we might all live in a state of perfect liberty, free of taxation and intrusive government, and that we should all be wealthier as well as freer. Now wish that people should, despite that lack of any restraint on their actions such as might be formed by policemen, functioning law courts, the SEC, and so on, not spend all their time screwing each other in predictable ways ranging from ordinary rape, through the selling of fraudulent stocks in non-existent ventures, up to the wholesale dumping of mercury in the public water supplies…
Enough said, no?
But let me give my take, anyway: Modern postliberalism is not a societal-improvement strategy. That is a cargo cult. The “good old days” were not that good. And even if you see them as days of high social solidarity and fecund birth rates, they did not happen despite GDP growth; they happened because of it. The Baby Boom was fueled by the spread of washing machines, refrigerators, and better medical care—technologies that reduced the cost of raising children and provided the material security necessary for families to flourish. The neo-fascist version of post-liberalism argues that “the belly may be full, but the spirit will be empty.” But their actual proposal is not to fill the spirit; it is simply to empty the belly, while pretending the resulting hunger is actually a form of spiritual discipline.
We have to look past the rhetoric of “community” and “tradition” and identify the underlying logic: fascism, or, more attractively, the Roman Bundle of Sticks. The logic is that the individual is merely a single stick—weak and fragile—but if we can tie ourselves together in a big bundle with leather thongs, we become a powerful force capable of doing stuff—primarily, in the Roman case, beating people up. In this framework, “community” is not about mutual support or shared flourishing; it is about cohesion for the purpose of domination. The “bundle” is only useful if there is a strong leader to wield it and an enemy—internal or external—to crush.
Francis Fukuyama famously argued in his The End of History that after 1945, this specific ideological path had been terminally closed by the verdict of history in the ashes that had been Nazi Berlin. He believed the failure of fascism and “really-existing-socialism” left liberal market democracy as the only viable endpoint for human social evolution. Fukuyama was wrong.
The “bundle of sticks “idea did not die in the ashes of Nazi Berlin. It is now back in as strange form—what we might call Zombie Neofascism.
Zombie Fascism doesn’t emerge from a coherent philosophical desire to return to an agrarian idyll. Instead, it emerges whenever the rapid economic growth required to make people feel they are doing better than their parents fails. When the promise of liberal modernity—that tomorrow will be materially better than today, and by clearly more than enough to offset the unease generated as all that is solid melts into air—stutters, a vacuum is created. The postliberals do not fill this vacuum with new institutions, new religious revivals, or genuine community-building projects. Instead, they fill it with resentment.
They offer a “rectification of names,” rebranding neofascism as “populism” to hide its true nature. This is not the populism of the 19th-century American farmer fighting railroad monopolies; that was a reality-based movement seeking rational policy cures for material grievances. The New Right’s project is different. It offers:
Redistribution of wealth to family and friends (cronyism).
A leap in inequality via the erosion of progressive taxation and social insurance.
The permission to hate people who look different or “rootless cosmopolites.”
The opposition to this project cannot simply (“simply”!) be a defense of GDP. We fight for paid family leave, better urban design, and genuine social connection. But we must also recognize that the “post-liberal” alternative is not a return to virtue, but a return to domination.
We must break the cargo cult by demonstrating that material prosperity—when managed with an eye toward equity and sustainability—is the only reliable foundation for any kind of spiritual or communal flourishing. We don’t need fewer “creature comforts”; we need a society where those comforts aren’t bought at the price of our health, our environment, or our sanity.
We must expose the “bundle of sticks” for what it is: an attempt to trade individual agency for the thrill of collective hatred. The liberal project’s greatest achievement was not just raising GDP, but the idea that a person’s value is not derived from their place in a bundle, but from their inherent dignity as an individual.
The New Right wants us to believe that we must choose between “meaning” and “modernity.” This is a false choice. The only meaning found in the postliberal project is the meaning of the boot on the neck. Where the belly is full, we then have the freedom and the resources to tend to the spirit.
The arrogance and stupidity of this so-called conservative movement that is infecting our country are beyond anything a reasonable person would consider an advantage for their life. They care so much for children, but they cancel or defund any program that is of assistance to children or their families. Where is the paid maternity leave? Where are the programs to support working parents with their child care needs? Where are the support programs, such as school lunches, Head Start, and maternal care for working mothers? J. D. Vance (just dumb) is supposed to be a Catholic, yet he argues against the Pope when the Pope says things that are in opposition to Dear Leader's policies. His concept of morality is not in any Christian bible that I have read, and where is he given the authority to criticize anyone's morality while he and his supporters are bombing and killing people, supporting the genocide in Israel, and funding ICE's programs of tearing families apart? GDP numbers do an excellent job of measuring those statistics it was designed to measure. A ruler won't tell you how fast your car is traveling, and maybe birth numbers are down because women don't want to be mothers. Maybe church attendance is down because a large number of people have seen how organized religion collects huge sums of money, while so many people are homeless and going to food banks. This may not mean they are less religious, only that they don't need large buildings and organizations to express their belief in a Supreme Being. It amazes me that people in Federal government positions, such as members of Congress, presidents, and members of the judiciary, who have the best healthcare, the best pensions, and the best sick leave, tell us, average citizens, that we have too many creature comforts. The luxuries that are bestowed on our elected officials are another economic figure that is not counted or broken out in the GDP numbers. Wouldn't those costs make interesting reading?
MMMM???
I didn't get far till the peabrain was wondering why JD was distancing himself from tDrumpf. t thinks the stock market is the be all and end all story of how the country is doing.
I guess he thinks if we all are in church on Sunday that will bring the restoration of "community".
The voice I hear from his party is "you are on your own now baby doll.", so get back to work and off your dead lazy ass.