One economic stat Trump can’t crow about

TODAY I’m going to continue to dig deeply into the government’s economic data — even if you are falling asleep.

Wake up! (Sound of pan being banged.)

You’ll have to decide soon whom you want to elect to Congress, and I’ve been telling you in two previous columns some of the tricks in the economic data.

First, I explained that the Labor Department, for no apparent reason, made a huge change in its seasonal adjustments — and those changes reduced job growth in August by a large amount.

Growth could have been a whopping 300,000 jobs instead of just 201,000. The Republicans ought to look into why the adjustments were changed to make the employment situation look worse than it really was.

After that, I explained in another column that there is a different adjustment coming to the October employment report.

Labor is going to add a very large number of jobs to the count because it thinks — but can’t prove — that its surveys are missing companies that are just coming into business.

That addition is going to guarantee that the crucial October report — crucial because it comes out the Friday before the midterms — will be better than it should be.

The Democrats should look into that, I wrote in a previous column.

Today’s topic is one that both parties (and the Federal Reserve) might want to take a look at. It’s on the gross domestic income, or the GDI as the Bureau of Labor Statistics calls it.

This is going to take some explaining, so stay with me. (Sound of a pan banging.)

Everyone knows what the gross domestic product is. The GDP, as it is called by its friends, is the total value of goods produced and services provided in a country in a year.

The GDP is what makes it into the newspaper headlines and onto the evening news. It’s what tells us — supposedly — how the economy is doing. For instance, the GDP for the second quarter of 2018 showed that the economy was growing at a 4.2 percent annual rate.

What that means is: The economy in the period of April, May and June grew by 1.05 percent. If it continued to grow at that rate for all four quarters of the year, the growth for 2018 would be 4.2 percent — or 1.05 percent times four quarters. That’s pretty good growth. But there’s another way the government measures economic growth — the GDI — and it’s not nearly as robust. This fact should be of interest to the Democrats who want to taint President Trump’s economic achievements — and to the Republicans who don’t want to look naive when pounding their chests.

The GDI is the flip side to the GDP — that is, the GDP is the amount spent on goods and services, while the GDI is the amount people and companies have to spend on goods and services.

The two figures should be relatively close because you can’t spend money unless you have it.

How much is the GDI growing? In the first quarter of 2018, GDI was expanding nicely at a 3.9 percent annual rate. But GDI’s growth was growing at only a 1.81 percent annual rate in the second quarter.

Many politicians make the mistake of declaring economic victory before people are feeling it.

The Republicans will be braying about the GDP growth, but the Dem- ocrats should be following the GDI.

The Atlanta Federal Reserve Bank on Monday said the GDP for the third quarter, which ended on Sunday, looks to have grown at a 4.1 annual percentage rate, down from the 4.2 percent in the second quarter.

That’s still good growth. But neither the Democrats nor the Republicans should trust any of these numbers. In their gut people really know what the economy is doing.

What do I think? I think that neither the Giants nor the Jets will make the playoffs this year.

The other day I was in Chinatown in lower Manhattan and a friend d of mine wanted to buy one of those knockoff Louis Vuitton pocketbooks.

You don’t have to walk very far before someone offers to sell you pocketbooks or watches. I don’t condone this sort of thing, but I was only tagging along.

The guy showed us a list of dozens of pocketbooks. My friend picked one but refused to pay the $120 he wanted for what would have been a $1,000plus bag — if it had been real.

She (with my help) negotiated the price down to $70.

I’ve written about knockoffs before, and I’ve been told there are two kinds. The first are the really bad quality ones from China that bear no resemblance to the authentic ones. The others are production overruns that Chinese factories make and then sell on the black market in places like Chinatown and at flea markets.

I bring this incident up because there was a story the other day about Beijing wanting help in figuring out a fair trade policy with the US.

I don’t think the Chinese are really interested in being fair, but I have an idea: Stop stealing our ideas, stop shipping counterfeit goods to our country, and stop acting like the Third World country you are not — and then, maybe, we’ll like to trade with you.

Trump recently raised tariffs on $250 billion of Chinese goods because he believes trade with that country has been unfair to the US. He’s right. It has been unfair. And as long as people continue to buy the knockoff pocketbooks and faux luxury items produced in China we will continue to have a trade war with a country with which the US could actually do a wonderful amount of fair trade.