Friday, April 30, 2004

War -- it's not just the Bush foreign policy, it seems as if it's the Bush economic policy:

U.S. Economy Grows 4.2%; War Spending Provides Push

The American economy grew at a vigorous annual rate of 4.2 percent in the first quarter, with military spending making a significant contribution to economic growth for the first time since the early days of the war in Iraq.

Consumers provided most of the lift, the Bureau of Economic Analysis reported yesterday. Business investment was also strong, adding more to the growth rate than the military outlays. Without the war spending, however, the gross domestic product would have expanded at an only mediocre pace: 3.5 percent....


--New York Times

The permanent war economy! War is the health of the state!

Of course, that "vigorous" rate wasn't as vigorous as expected:

Most forecasters had expected the G.D.P. to expand at an annual rate of at least 5 percent. They had counted on manufacturers to raise production for two reasons: to keep up with current brisk sales and to build up inventories in anticipation of more spending to come. The inventory buildup barely happened. Stockpiling rose at an annual rate of $15.3 billion. While that was nearly double the fourth-quarter pace, it was far short of the $30 billion to $40 billion that forecasters had expected....

Maybe we shouldn't we ending the siege in Falluja. War has started to look like the one area of the economy where we're really going to keep spending.

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