The Biden recession
by Byron York, Chief Political Correspondent |
| July 28, 2022 09:16 AM
THE BIDEN RECESSION. This morning the Commerce Department announced the economy shrank by 0.9% in the second quarter of 2022. That comes after the announcement last April that the economy contracted by 1.6% in the first quarter of this year. Now, the United States has had two consecutive quarters of negative economic growth, which is the popularly accepted definition of a recession. So it's official: The U.S. is in a recession.
But it is not official. Denying long-standing standards, the Biden administration will not admit that the economy is in recession. For days leading up to the Commerce Department announcement, senior administration officials made the case that two quarters of negative growth do not necessarily equal a recession, and in this case, although such a situation is exceedingly rare, the economy has experienced two quarters of contraction yet is not in recession.
The administration's allies are accepting the Biden argument. "Some liberal media outlets are beginning to fall in line with the Biden administration's spin on redefining what a recession is," Fox News reported this week. "There's been a major push by the White House to preemptively declare that even if the U.S. economy has shrunk in two consecutive quarters, that doesn't necessarily mean the economy is in recession." To cite one example, on the night before the numbers were released, Politico described the coming government figures as "the first, possibly inaccurate and certain to be revised reading of U.S. economic performance in the second quarter of this deeply weird economic year."
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/the-biden-recession
