Gaslighting Recession

7/28/22
 
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from The Gray Area:
7/28/22:

2nd Quarter GDP numbers were reported today, down 0.9%, for the second quarter in a row. That is the accepted definition of a recession.

Yet The Biden administration is changing the definition of “recession,” just ahead of Thursday’s economic reports. President Biden said today, ‘doesn’t look like recession to me‘. He stated the low unemployment rates, the 9M jobs created, and a few examples of business investment as evidence the country is on the ‘right path’. Wow, gaslighting to the nth degree.

Lets look at his evidence first. Created 9M jobs? That is probably the most outrageous data point I hear from the administration and his media supporters. What did he do to create jobs, nothing. His policies since entering office has hurt jobs. The creation he claims is simply the rebound of jobs lost from pandemic shutdowns. If the job of President and all in Congress were vacant the past tow years, more jobs would have returned and been increased. The same has impacted unemployment numbers. There are 10M jobs open with no one to fill them. Job participation is down. Supply chain continues to be bottlenecked. With money being printed everywhere, nothing to spend it on, and vacant jobs, production is down and thus GDP. Not to mention inflation, historic gas prices, food prices increases, housing price increases and Biden asking for more spending, consumer confidence is dramatically down. To paraphrase Biden’s words, that doesn’t sound like the ‘right path’ to me.

The TPPF illustrates changing the definition won’t take the pain away. “The Biden administration would like to deflect any cause for concern about a recession given its poor approval rating below 40%, but the evidence of crushed income, savings, and dreams felt by many Americans prove this is not a good economic situation whether they want to call it a recession or not,” says TPPF’s Vance Ginn. “But the last 10 times there were two consecutive quarters of negative real GDP growth there was a called recession.”

Below is an example of how the media reacted to recession 2 years ago and now.
CNN’s Chris Cillizza, himself a partisan liberal, pushed back against the administration’s political sugarcoating of the economy. “There is a technical definition — two straight quarters of negative economic growth,” Cillizza said, rejecting the White House’s attempts to explain away an incoming recession.

Here are a couple of other comments on the idea of changing the recession definition for political purposes:

Just tell the truth. The President, his Democrat supporters and his supporters in the media are just embarrassing themselves with this gaslighting. Even the most tuned out voter can see these are all lies.

More From TPPF:

More From The Patriot Project: