For decades, we’ve all understood what a recession is, and we didn’t argue about it. It has been long defined as two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth. Nancy Pelosi said exactly this in 2008. The fact is, it didn’t matter if the president was a Democrat or a Republican, this has been the longstanding objective standard, and up until last week, that definition hasn’t been disputed.
Suddenly, we’ve found ourselves in the middle of a war of semantics. What is a recession? Joe Biden, who inherited an economy in recovery, wants us to believe that two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth, which has now officially happened, doesn’t mean we’re in a recession.
What is a recession, according to the White House? Good luck finding out because they refuse to offer their own alternative definition.
Why not? Well, Joe Biden has spent the past year boasting about his historically unmatched economic record, and an objective standard for defining a recession isn’t politically advantageous at the moment. The mainstream media gleefully joined in, and a quick internet search yields countless articles aimed at insisting that just because we’ve experienced two consecutive quarters of negative growth doesn’t actually mean we’re in the middle of a recession.
Related: White House: The Economy Is Great Because We’re Not Like Other Places ‘Facing Famine’
“We’re Not In A Recession, But We Could Be Soon,” claims HuffPost. New York Magazine says “it’s complicated.” CNN published an article that insists economists are “absolutely sure” we’re not in a recession.
Sadly, the war of words and definitions took another dark and scary turn this week, as Wikipedia, the massive open-source online dictionary, has updated various articles on recessions in order to match the White House talking points.
“An edit war broke out on Wikipedia this week over the definition of ‘recession,’ as the Biden administration and the corporate media take the unprecedented step of denying the U.S. is in recession even after two consecutive quarters of negative growth,” reports Breitbart. “More than 70 edits to the page about recessions were made before the site locked the entry preventing further changes.”
So, the gatekeepers at Wikipedia have decided to change the longstanding definition of “recession” and are now blocking anyone from making future changes. The Biden definition stands… that is, of course, until the next time we experience two quarters of negative GDP growth while a Republican is president–then I’m sure the traditional definition will once again become the standard.
But for now, the longstanding definition of a recession has been deemphasized on Wikipedia, in favor of the one being pushed by the Biden administration–the more vague definition of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), which says that a recession is a ”significant decline in economic activity spread across the market, lasting more than a few months.”
According to Breitbart, the vague and arguably subjective NBER definition is now “littered throughout the Wikipedia page on recessions.”
Make no mistake about it: the Ministry of Truth that you read about in George Orwell’s 1984 is here.
