On Thursday, we learned that the United States is officially in a recession. Though, as my PJMedia colleague Athena Thorne noted, “it could have been worse.”
According to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) shrank 0.9% in the second quarter of 2022, after having shrunk 1.6% in the first quarter. Two consecutive quarters of negative growth is the longstanding definition of a recession — no matter how much the Biden administration denies it.
In response to the economic report, Joe Biden released a statement that tried to spin the report as good news.
“Coming off of last year’s historic economic growth – and regaining all the private sector jobs lost during the pandemic crisis – it’s no surprise that the economy is slowing down as the Federal Reserve acts to bring down inflation.”
It’s “no surprise,” he says. In other words, move along, please disperse; there’s nothing to see here. Joe Biden likes to take credit for “creating” jobs on his watch, but the truth is, the vast majority of jobs that have been “created” weren’t created at all — they were jobs lost during the pandemic recovered thanks to the economy reopening. And frankly, things still aren’t going as well as he wants us to believe. While the private sector has recovered the jobs lost, the public sector is still lagging far behind. Perhaps the most telling statistic is that the labor force participation rate stands at 62.2%, which is still below the pre-pandemic level of 63.4%.
“But even as we face historic global challenges, we are on the right path and we will come through this transition stronger and more secure,” Biden continued. “Our job market remains historically strong, with unemployment at 3.6% and more than 1 million jobs created in the second quarter alone.”
He did not mention wages, of course, because wage growth is lagging behind inflation. That’s just a little piece of information that Biden thinks he can memory hole by not talking about it.
Not once in his statement did he mention the word “recession.” Why not? Because as far as the Biden administration is concerned, we aren’t in a recession. Sure, we meet the longstanding definition of a recession, but the White House thinks it will convince the public that we’re not in a recession by simply redefining what it is. It won’t work. Before the BEA report, most people believed we were in a recession already,
This is what the Biden administration’s economic strategy has always been: denial.
Last year, when the inflation rate had jumped from 2.0% to 5.4%, Americans were justifiably concerned. But, according to Joe Biden, we had nothing to worry about. He insisted that “no serious economist” believed inflation would be a prolonged problem. In other words, all was well. Just go about your business because everything is fine. But things weren’t okay, and inflation hit 9.1% in June. So of course, after a year and a half of pretending that inflation wasn’t a problem, Biden now insists he’s on top of it.
How can we believe that when he can’t even admit we’re in a recession?
