The US Economy has entered recession after two straight quarters of economic stagnation. Fox Business. Gross domestic product shrunk by 0.9%, falling far short of the 0.5% growth economists expected in the 2nd quarter of 2022. This is after the economy shrunk by 1.6% in the 1st quarter of 2022, which was the worst since the 2020 pandemic. However, Democrats are arguing that due to high employment and consumer spending a recession has not arrived yet. The downturn is the result of extreme inflation and high energy prices, which has eroded spending power.
My Comment:
The Democrats are famously trying to downplay this news, claiming that the definition of recession isn't just two quarters of economic retraction. Nope, now it needs to include bad employment numbers. That's just gaslighting and if Donald Trump was president right now, which he should be, you know they would be calling this a recession.
As far as I am concerned we are pretty obviously in a recession. If there are two quarters of economic failure than that's a recession, end of discussion. And it's very obvious that the economy is not doing well. Inflation is totally out of control and so are energy prices and there is no indication that either of those things are going to change soon.
I also think that the high employment rate is noise. The economy fundamentally changed after the 2020 pandemic. The virus forced a lot of people out of work and a lot of those people found out that they could make it without returning to the workforce. Indeed, the workface participation rate is at 62.2%, which never recovered from the pre-pandemic rate of 63.4%. A lot of those people are still not looking for jobs as they are either stay at home parents or are working off the books.
I also have to point out it's idiotic to claim that the unemployment rate is a good thing when the country is still in a labor shortage. Of course the unemployment rate is low, there are still a ton of jobs that are unfilled! I haven't seen the numbers for the 2nd quarter of 2022 but in the 1st quarter there were 11.5 million job vacancies! Of course the employment rate is good!
The economy is in dire straits and I don't see anything changing soon. Congress is still passing huge spending bills that aren't paid by taxes but paid by printing new money, which obviously contributes to inflation. Energy prices will remain high until we either lift sanctions against Russia or start drilling again, and Biden is going to ensure that we don't do either.
So why are the Democrats so desperate to avoid the dreaded R word? Well they don't want to point out that stagflation is happening. We are dealing with economic retraction and inflation at the same time. You know who was the last President who had to deal with that? Jimmy Carter. And what did his presidency lead to? Three consecutive terms of Republican presidents (which would have been five if not for Ross Perot). This bad economic news is terrible for Joe Biden and it's little wonder he and the Democrats are trying to play mind games with the definition of words.
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