GDP

In the first video i learned a lot. I learned that the economy is either growing or shrinking all the time and with every penny we spend its all gets rolled up into GDP. For example like cars, toothpaste, cereal all gets added into GDP. But anything that is imported into the US like from china for instance is taken out of GDP. I never knew that manufacturing is 12% of GDP and Health Care is the most expensive its 16% of GDP. If you were to buy an old building to live in that wouldn't count towards GDP but a new building being built would. The government would actually try and guess by a lot of data about market information how much it would cost if you actually rented out that old building that you live in. So from that i found out that 1.9 trillion got added to GDP for just housing. The GDP for 2010 was 14.5 trillion which was the biggest GDP. Basically you need a GDP to keep growing which is the most important thing about it. When i listened to Why GDP is like GPA, i learned that GDP is not always a perfect number because of everything that if being manufactured and bought changes it all the time. What really surprised me and raised a question that i thought of was how if you buy a tomato that goes towards GDP but if you were to grow it it does not go towards GDP same with if you hired a nanny to watch your kids that goes towards GDP but if you watched your kids by yours self that would not goes towards GDP. So why would we buy things and give the government our money when we could save more and do things ourselves? Also with the oil spill all the helpers that helped clean the oil spill is calculated into GDP but nothing was subtracted from the environmental issues themselves. What also surprised me was that by preventing air pollution the GDP could be 2% lower than it is now. We spend 17% of GDP on healthcare which is a lot compared to Europe. In Europe its less than 10% and also the US spends more than 4.0% of GDP on military which is major also while Europe is less than 1.0%. All three things about GDP gave me things to think about and definitely stirred up questions.