This isn't just a question of current policy; using GDP and GDP per capita as an indicator of quality of life for working people is ridiculously misleading. Saying this as a professional statistician: the idea between GDP and GDP per capita being relevant to YOUR quality of life is based on the assumption that they are meaningful measures of the wealth available to the average person. This would be true if the distribution of wealth among people or households were normally distributed, as GDP per capita is effectively just another way of saying "arithmetic mean income".



However, incomes are NOT normally distributed, and it is a very basic fact of statistics that arithmetic means are often not at all informative as measurements of central tendencies in highly skewed distributions, which the distribution of wealth in the USA absolutely UNQUESTIONABLY is. In fact if you look at the relationship between change in GDP versus the change in real income for people in various income brackets, you will find that changes in GDP are very poorly predictive of changes in personal income, and in fact are NEGATIVELY correlated with income in the lowest income brackets over the past few decades. Measuring median income (as opposed to arithmetic mean) would be a much better statement of how the economy is going for average people, and yet we still get policy makers and economists who should absolutely know better talking about the GDP as though it's meaningful to you.



Just to give you a quick example for non-stats nerds out there: let's say you're in a room with nine other people. One of those people suddenly inherits ten million dollars. The total amount of money in that room (e.g., GDP) has just gone up by ten million. The GDP per capita has just gone up by ten million divided by the ten people in the room, i.e., one million. However, NONE of that new wealth goes to most of the people in the room. The median wealth in the room is still zero, and that's the figure that's relevant to most people's quality of life.



tl;dr version: Anyone who uses GDP or GDP per capita to talk about things that are relevant to your quality of life is using a statistic that is effectively meaningless to you. It is a very basic way that people lie with statistics, and it's ubiquitous among policy makers.