By John Talberth
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20 Sep, 2023
Legislation update September 2023 : After garnering the support of NGOs and five co-sponsors, Rep. Omar is now exploring options for reintroduction of the GPI Act in 2024 or possible inclusion of key components of the bill in appropriations language. Stay tuned here for further updates as the reintroduction date approaches. Original post July 2021: On July 30th, Representative Ilhan Omar (D-MN) introduced the GPI Act of 2021, directing the Secretary of Commerce to establish a new metric for measuring US economic performance, setting budget priorities and guiding policy– the Genuine Progress Indicator. If her bill becomes law, the GPI would effectively unseat Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as the nation’s leading economic indicator, a reform long sought after by politicians, economists and civil society. Rep. Omar was joined by five House co-sponsors including Jamaal Bowman, Cori Bush, Dwight Evans, Pramila Jaypal and Marie Newman. Against the backdrop of a global pandemic and on the heels of one of the nation’s most fractured and contentious election cycles, the world of economic indicators may seem distant and esoteric, irrelevant to struggles Americans are facing every day. But the legislation is, in fact, revolutionary and transformative, signaling a long overdue shift in economic priorities away from the bottom-line profits of Wall Street corporations and towards improving economic conditions for those least well off and ordinary American households. With Biden-Harris now at the helm, this new metric should be a centerpiece of the administration’s economic policies. Despite its many logical failings and fallacies, Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and its state-level counterparts still reign as the most ubiquitous measures of economic performance. It works well for the world’s elites who own the means of production because when GDP grows it means more buying and selling from which they profit. But more buying and selling is not always a good thing. Sometimes it represents something that is truly beneficial (healthy food and experiences in nature) and other times it represents a cost we’d rather avoid (inflated health insurance premiums) or expenditures that reflect growing insecurity around us (guns and burglar alarms). GDP does not differentiate between costs and benefits; it considers all spending beneficial and as such provides an extremely poor measure of economic wellbeing.