Mysterious economic slowdown!

http://www.nbcnews.com/business/economywatch/us-economys-contraction-just-brief-pause-1B8174851

For the first time since 2009, the United States' economy has actually shrunk.  The article notes that this is a "brief pause" in an ongoing "recovery."  What is the cause of this inexplicable halt?  According to the article, it's a combination of Hurricane Sandy (totally plausible) and... defense cuts.  Then it gets really wacky.  Apparently, somehow taking money out of the economy and then spending it on stuff that blows up contributes to the economy.  If one looks deeper into this article, it reveals the very, very poor methods used to measure economic progress.

Currently, one of the main measures of the economy is Gross National Product - that is, in essence, how much is being built.  This is all well and good, until one realizes that government spending is factored into it, despite not actually producing anything, but rather taking money out of the economy, wasting a good portion, and then spending the remnant on various projects, going into impossibly deep debt in the process.  In other words, spending money that does not exist is factored into our GDP.  Thus, in World War II, despite the fact that Joe American was actually worse off (Depression + feeding huge numbers of soldiers who are not at the moment producing anything), is often listed as what "got us out of the Depression," since GDP went up.  The problem is, that production, while necessary, consisted largely of tanks, aircraft carriers, and bombers (and the Manhattan Project).

The lesson to be learned from this article is that our system of measuring growth is fundamentally flawed.  Under the assumptions of the authors, any economic problem can be solved by truly epic-scale debt spending (didn't that result in the French Revolution?) and higher taxes to partially fund the spending.  Sure, GDP goes up impressively - but Joe American is decidedly not better off.

One final thing to note: the article mentions that the Federal Reserve is keeping interest rates artificially low, contributing to the "recovery."  As horrible as it is, this means that, in part, the recovery is yet another bubble - exactly like the one that popped in 2008.  A good thing to look up in reference to this is the Austrian Business Cycle Theory (ABCT), which is far too involved to explain here.