Remember when the White House, deciding they weren’t fighting enough battles on enough fronts, decided to take on the automotive site Edmunds.com for its criticism of “Cash for Clunkers”?
One of their points was, “We found out that motor vehicle output added 1.7% to economic growth in the third quarter – the largest contribution to quarterly growth in over a decade.”
Er, not anymore. The revised numbers out today indicate that automotive consumption was less than half of what was initially estimated, contributing 0.81 of a percentage point to growth. The overall quarterly growth number was revised from 3.5 percent to 2.8 percent.
