nakedempire


The American Empire in a Changing World



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Tuesday, September 20, 2011

'Inside the Trillion-Dollar Underground Economy Keeping Many Americans (Barely) Afloat in Desperate Times'

when the feds start putting bankers in jail, American will rejoin the real economy........from alternet.......

.............."That's where the underground economy comes in. Also called the shadow or informal economy, it's not just illegal activity like selling drugs or doing sex work. It's all sorts of work that doesn't get regulated by the government or reported to the IRS, and it's a far bigger part of the economy than most of us are aware—in 2009, economics professor Friedrich Schneiderestimated that it was nearly 8 percent of the US GDP, somewhere around $1 trillion. (That makes the shadow GDP bigger than the entire GDP of Turkey or Austria.) Schneider doesn’t include illegal activities in his count-- he studies legal production of goods and services that are outside of tax and labor laws. And that shadow economy is growing as regular jobs continue to be hard to come by—Schneider estimated 5 percent in '09 alone"...........READ MORE



check out our other stories on the underground economy.....HERE

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