The chocolate ration has been raised to 20 grams per week
By 
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said Sunday that government spending could be separated from gross domestic product reports, in response to questions about whether the spending cuts pushed by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency could possibly cause an economic downturn.
“You know that governments historically have messed with GDP,” Lutnick said on Fox News Channel’s “Sunday Morning Futures.” “They count government spending as part of GDP. So I’m going to separate those two and make it transparent.”
Doing so could potentially complicate or distort a fundamental measure of the U.S. economy’s health. Government spending is traditionally included in the GDP because changes in taxes, spending, deficits and regulations by the government can impact the path of overall growth. GDP reports already include extensive details on government spending, offering a level of transparency for economists.
Musk’s efforts to downsize federal agencies could result in the layoffs of tens of thousands of federal workers, whose lost income could potentially reduce their spending, affecting businesses and the economy at large.
The commerce secretary’s remarks echoed Musk’s arguments made Friday on X that government spending doesn’t create value for the economy.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the U.S. private sector has been in a recession — putting the blame on the Biden administration’s agenda.
What they’re saying: “Our goal is to reprivatize the economy,” Bessent said Tuesday at the Australian Embassy, just four blocks away from the Treasury Department.
“The private sector has been in a recession,” Bessent said, adding that recent jobs growth has been concentrated in health care, government and education.
“This degree of concentration in the relatively less productive sectors of the economy is not only highly unusual relative to pre-pandemic years, but presents a drag on the growth potential of the U.S. economy.”
This is all a prelude to more or less openly juking the government’s economic statistics, in order to show that the US was “really” in a recession during the Biden administration, and the recession that’s about to hit is only a recession if you don’t exclude government spending, which should be excluded because hey look a squirrel!
“It appeared that there had even been demonstrations to thank Big Brother for raising the chocolate ration to twenty grams a week. And only yesterday […] it had been announced that the ration was to be reduced to twenty grams a week. Was it possible that they could swallow that, after only twenty-four hours? Yes, they swallowed it. […] The eyeless creature at the other table swallowed it fanatically. passionately, with a furious desire to track down, denounce, and vaporize anyone who should suggest that last week the ration had been thirty grams. Syme, too-in some more double complex way, involving doublethink-Syme, swallow it. Was he, then, alone in the possession of a memory?”
China experts in American academia automatically disbelieve all official economic statistics issued by the PRC, on the basis of the salutatory interpretive principle that the Chinese Communist Party simply makes up whatever statistics it finds convenient to publish at any moment.
This heuristic will soon be equally applicable to the American government, at least as long as it remains under Trumpist control.
ETA: As several commenters note, the government GDP statistics already disaggregate public and private spending. So on top of being extremely stupid this is all based on a lie.