White House Attempts to Redefine 'Recession'

The White House is attempting to do preemptive damage control by avoiding any real definition of a recession.

Peter Doocy just confronted Karine Jean-Pierre on Biden's Economic Council Director Brian Deese's 2008 comments that "the technical definition of a recession is two consecutive quarters of negative growth." pic.twitter.com/zltziNKLa1

— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) July 27, 2022

Peter Doocy, the White House correspondent for Fox News, confronted White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre on the issue of recession. Doocy reminded Jean-Pierre that “the technical definition of a recession is two consecutive quarters of negative growth.”

Jean-Pierre claimed that the definition Doocy cited is not the definition of a recession but said that there were many economic factors to consider.

“We have a strong labor market, we have a business [sic] that’s investing,” she declared, also mentioning that consumers are “investing and purchasing.” She also referenced a 3.6% unemployment rate.

The White House website defines the factors that determine a recession as “a holistic look at the data—including the labor market, consumer and business spending, industrial production, and incomes.”

The site also assures unsuspecting readers that “based on these data, it is unlikely that the decline in GDP in the first quarter of this year—even if followed by another GDP decline in the second quarter—indicates a recession.”

In other words, as long as the U.S. economy has not completely imploded to the point that the dollar has absolutely lost all value, then technically we’re not in a recession.

As long as things could be worse, then they are not bad enough to be called a recession.

The truth is that the second quarter of 2022 has decreased by an annual rate of 0.9%, according to the advance estimate released by the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

Don’t worry. Even if we’re in a recession, we just won’t call it that, and that will make everything okay.