Cheney: Economic stats miss eBay sales"Out of touch" puts it mildly. "Off the wall" is a better description. The amount of money changing hands on e-Bay, or all of the various cyber auction sites combined, is an eyedropper in the sea of this economy. Might as well include the relative pittances I and others make with through the Google Adsense program on sites like this one.
Associated Press
Indicators measure the nation's unemployment rate, consumer spending and other economic milestones, but Vice President Dick Cheney says it misses the hundreds of thousands who make money selling on eBay.
"That's a source that didn't even exist 10 years ago," Cheney told an audience in Cincinnati on Thursday. "Four hundred thousand people make some money trading on eBay."
San Jose, Calif.-based EBay Inc. is an Internet auction site where anyone can sell just about anything, including clothing, cell phones, jewelry, memorabilia, trinkets and automobiles.
Democratic vice presidential candidate John Edwards responded that Cheney's comments show how "out of touch" he and President Bush are with the economy.
"If we only included bake sales and how much money kids make at
lemonade stands, this economy would really be cooking," Edwards said in a statement.
If Cheney thinks including those figures in the official economic forecasts would help the Bush campaign, he should go right ahead. But the difference between 0 and 1/1000 of one percent is statistically meaningless.
1 comment:
I dunno. The hundred bucks I got from selling my Gamecube moved me into a higher tax bracket.
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