GDP is growing – right? Or is someone lying to us?

I see the point of this website being to bring either stories or angles to stories that are not mentioned or conveniently forgotten in the mainstream media. A hopefully good example of this was yesterday’s post where, by showing a simple chart of the almost unbelievably fast population growth in the arid, infertile Sudan, I dared suggest that everything the aid agencies were doing there with our money was only making the situation worse.

Recently there have been loads of stories in the media about how the UK GDP was growing and how UK GDP had passed the level it was before the financial crisis and how this showed the ‘success’ of the Coalition’s policies and how Britain was ‘shooting ahead’ of countries like France and even Germany. All total tosh, of course. Today I’d like to quickly expose the great ‘GDP is growing’ lie.

GDP is a dreadful measure of national output as it includes public spending. So, the more a government borrows and spends (or wastes) the higher the GDP will look. Britain currently borrows around �100bn a year. And we apparently have GDP growth of perhaps 2.5% a year. On a �1.7trn economy, 2.5% GDP growth equates to growth of �42.5bn a year. So, our Government is achieving an almost incredible feat of borrowing and spending �100bn a year to give GDP growth of just �42.5bn a year.

But there’s another problem with the�great ‘GDP is growing’ lie. Around 46,000 immigrants are arriving in the UK each month (552,000 a year) and getting NI numbers so they can either work or claim benefits or (thanks to idiot Gordon Brown’s immensely complicated tax credits system) both work and claim benefits at the same time. Moreover, all these immigrants will be getting services like healthcare, schooling for their children, housing for those without work and so on. This naturally pushes up government spending and, as the Government doesn’t raise enough in taxes, it has to borrow ever more which our children and their children and their children will have to pay back.

Here’s a chart which shows what is really happening to GDP (Google Chrome won’t let me enlarge the chart so click to see more clearly)

Total GDP is rising (the blue columns on the chart). But, because the population is growing due to immigration and high birth rates among immigrants, GDP per capita (the red columns on the chart) is hopelessly below the level it reached before the financial crash.

The Government and its sycophantic journalistic supporters and pig-ignorant TV reporters use the GDP �figures to claim Britain is a wonderful success. But the more relevant GDP per capita figures show we’re getting poorer and that much of the supposed growth in GDP probably comes from increased government spending on immigrants.

So, the more immigration the Government allows, the more it will look like GDP is growing.�What a total disaster for our country!