It just keeps growing and growing and growing.

The headline 2.8% number for the third quarter of 2024 GDP was solid. But when you look underneath the hood it wasn’t nearly the triumph that the media has reported.

Government purchases grew at 5% or twice the pace of the private sector’s 2.5%. This is a travesty – not a victory.

Also worrisome is that the most important component of GDP – investment – crawled ahead at 0.3%. The winter is coming and no one is planting.

Our economist, E.J. Antoni, notes that government consumption expenditures (which exclude things like transfer payments) have grown faster than consumer spending now in 8 of the last 9 quarters. And almost $3.3 trillion of annual personal consumption expenditures are a result of government transfer payments as of the third quarter.

Additionally, the federal debt increased by almost twice as much as the increase in GDP, providing yet further evidence that what appears in the statistics as economic growth is actually the government expanding its debt load to $35 trillion.

This is modern monetary theory on steroids. Does anyone think this is going to have a happy ending?