In five pages the consumer spending patterns as overseen by the U.S. Department of Labor are considered and compared in order to denote any important changes in the recent past. Four sources are cited in the bibliography.
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recent reports to any significant changes that have occurred in past years. CONSUMER SPENDING A key to understanding national income accounting is that everything that is produced
is also sold. If the business sector produces goods that it cannot sell to anyone else, these must be added to business inventories and the changes in these inventories
then count as sales of the output to business. Sales to the household sector are called consumption expenditures. These are defined as final sales so they all
count as part of gross national product. This consumption can be divided into many categories. Consumer durable goods are such things as refrigerators and washing machines, while non-durables
are items that have a short useful life such as a loaf of bread. Services are things such as movies, concerts, etc. Services form a large part of
total consumption (Seskin 1998). When figuring the consumer spending patterns only the final goods or final sales are accounted for and not intermediate goods. Intermediate goods are those that
are sold to be further processed into final goods (Stokes PG). Another component of gross national product is the product of the government sector. The product of the
business sector is its sales of final product, measured in dollars. In order to determine the product originating in the government sector, the value of the product is defined
as equal to governments compensation of employees, or the wages and salaries paid to government workers. Government agencies at the local, state and federal level hire employees to produce
services. Since these services are not sold in the marketplace it is difficult to place a value on them. For this reason they are valued at the wages