Before I tell you about the legacy dinosaur media's next BIG LIE, I need to show you how they'll sell it. It starts, as these things always do, with the Left attempting to control the language to alter your perceptions about how the economy performed under Presidentish Joe Biden and will perform under President Donald Trump.
We might be done with Biden but he isn't done with us, as you're about to see.
There was a recession in late 2021/early 2022, commonly defined as two consecutive quarters of economic shrinkage. Except the "non-partisan" National Bureau of Economic Research decided to change the commonly understood definition. In 2022, wouldn't you know, it turned out that "many factors go into that calculation," and that the Biden recession wasn't a recession at all when you looked at the "many factors" that nobody had ever looked at before.
The White House got into the game, too, with the White House Council of Economic Advisors citing a "holistic look at the data," instead of playing by the established rules.
The press played along and pretended the recession never happened.
Convenient, eh?
I'd also add that if you take away Biden's monstrous budget deficits, any economic growth that happened on his watch was an illusion. We entered a government-engineered recession during the lockdowns of 2020 and, thanks to epic economic mismanagement under Biden, we never left it.
Budget deficits are a drag on future growth and should be subtracted from our GDP figures. But the same government that spends more than it takes in — currently by trillions of dollars — pretends that deficits are growth and, again, the press plays along.
So convenient.
Private sector jobs and wages stagnated under Biden because everything was driven by Big Government and sold to you by Big Media.
It was a helluva party that Biden threw for his well-connected buddies. Now comes the hangover, and some on the Left already have a word for the recession that hasn't happened yet: Trumpcession.
Assuming we do end up with a recession, they'll probably call it the Trump Depression or something along those lines. I might be exaggerating but not by much. During the 1992 presidential campaign, Bill Clinton claimed that President George H.W. Bush gave us "the worst economy since the Great Depression," even though the 1991 recession was mild, short-lived, and over for a year before Clinton won the Democrat nomination.
The press helped him get away with it, too.
The conveniences keep piling up.
Here are the facts, as dreadful as they are.
All of our "growth" for the last five years is due to unsustainable deficits that will haunt generations of Americans yet to be born. Economic decisions are increasingly driven by growth-killing mandates and regulations imposed by Biden and the Democrats during 2021-2022. Consumer spending is driven in large part by cheap imports from a country that hates us.
Getting over our addiction to new debt will be painful. Undoing the Biden regulatory binge comes with political risks that some so-called Republicans in Congress refuse to take. Homeshoring — or at least friendshoring — comes with the shock and pain of tariffs.
The last time a new president faced an economic crisis like this one was Ronald Reagan in 1981. The recession he engineered with Fed Chair Paul Volcker that year genuinely was one of the worst since the Great Depression, but it was the price that had to be paid to wring Johnson/Nixon/Carter stagflation out of the system. It was a helluva risk they took but it paid off with 20 years of almost uninterrupted and unprecedented growth.
So hang on tight because the so-called Trumpcession is in reality the final price to be paid for four years of Joe Biden.
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