George Orwell’s 1984 was meant to be a warning of a dystopian society, not a propaganda playbook for the modern leftist.
Unfortunately, the novel has become exactly that. Whenever language doesn’t fit the approved narrative, the standard operating procedure is to simply change the definition of words to make them fit – and as we have seen repeatedly, language is as interchangeable as a pair of shoes to the modern tyrannical left. The word ‘vaccine’ is just one example.
Now, the Biden Regime is attempting to save face in the wake of the economic fallout from their disastrous agenda.
On Sunday, the White House published a document on its website that tries to explain away the economic hardship that Americans are currently facing by redefining what it means to be in a recession.
Despite a cratering stock market, unprecedented inflation, stagnated wages, high unemployment, debt at all-time highs, and GDP contracting month-over-month – all of which are the traditional indicators of a recession, the Biden White House is saying not to worry because, according to their experts and the new definition they came up with out of whole cloth, none of it “indicates a recession.”
The Biden Administration is redefining “recession” in an effort to avoid political backlash.
It’s not a recession if you change the definition of recession.
Soviet-level propaganda from a soviet-level regime. pic.twitter.com/bXtvPpOeD8
— BowTiedRanger (@BowTiedRanger) July 24, 2022
According to the Biden Regime, two straight quarters of falling GDP, which has widely been accepted as the starting point of a recession (even the International Monetary Fund defines a recession as “two consecutive quarters of decline in a country’s real [inflation-adjusted] gross domestic product”), no longer qualifies under the new definition. Instead, there are several other factors that “constitute a recession,” according to the document, including the “labor market (currently more workers than jobs), consumer and business spending (beginning to decline), industrial production (declining and already nearly nonexistent), and incomes (real wages are in freefall).
Pay no mind that all of those factors are severely underperforming in addition to two straight quarters of declining GDP.
Just like other “problematic” words (such as ‘woman), people are asking too many questions that hit too close to reality, so the ministry of truth has to put in overtime to ‘correct’ the record.
This is propaganda at its finest. Even Stalin would be proud.
From the White House document, titled “How do economists determine whether the economy is in a recession:”
“What is a recession? While some maintain that two consecutive quarters of falling real GDP constitute a recession, that is neither the official definition nor the way economists evaluate the state of the business cycle. Instead, both official determinations of recessions and economists’ assessment of economic activity are based on a holistic look at the data—including the labor market, consumer and business spending, industrial production, and incomes.
Based on these data, it is unlikely that the decline in GDP in the first quarter of this year—even if followed by another GDP decline in the second quarter—indicates a recession.”
While Biden’s ‘experts’ are doing everything possible to avoid acknowledging that what’s happening right now amounts to a recession, the document doesn’t hesitate to label the completely manufactured, lockdown-fueled economic shutdown in 2020 as America’s last “recession” period.
Not only that, but they take it a step further, claiming that we aren’t in a recession, we’re in an “expansion,”
Yes, really… because the current situation, filled with unprecedented global economic collapse, signals that we are apparently in a much better spot in July 2022 than we were in April 2020… welcome to 1984.
What’s more, the document justifies the ridiculous claim that we are not in a recession by citing several ill-defined metrics with no raw data – and, to make the data more favorable, it is cut off from showing anything from before April 2020.
In other words, the economy was so depressed in the wake of Covid lockdowns, especially within the metrics that the White House cites (labor, consumer spending, etc.) that the only direction they could go once lockdowns were lifted was up. By cutting it off where they did, it is much easier to manipulate it to fit their agenda.
According to the WH, the “official recession scorekeeper” – The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) – is showing all of its “recession-indicator variables” have exhibited “strong growth” since the “beginning of the pandemic;” therefore, because of this data, the US can not be in a recession, they claim.
The NBER also doesn’t factor inflation into their determination of a recession, the WH document admits.
“Figure 1 shows the trend in four of the NBER committee’s recession-indicator variables—real income minus transfers, real spending, industrial production, and employment—relative to their values in April 2020 (the trough of the last recession, and thus, the month before the current expansion began). All of these indicators have exhibited strong growth in the U.S. economy since the start of the pandemic, and have continued to expand through the first half of this year…
…The committee does not directly consider inflation; however, it is embedded in the real income and spending variables it tracks, including those plotted in Figure 1.”
To top it all off, their claim only holds true if you believe the cherry-picked data being pushed by these propagandists is accurate, and not completely cooked. As we have seen with the inflation metrics, they too were manipulated in favor of the DC swamp following a 200x update that significantly changed the way inflation is calculated. If the same metrics were used today, inflation would be 2-3x higher than what is currently being reported by the Biden Regime.
Despite all of the real-world economic turmoil, the document unbelievably concludes that the US is currently experiencing one of the strongest labor markets in history. While it may be true that the Biden regime’s numbers show a robust number of jobs added, it is far from the best indicator of the strength of the economy, especially when millions of working-aged Americans are currently stuck without employment and the Covid lockdowns had already decimated the job market.
From the WH:
“Those data show that while inflation is highly elevated, real spending is still growing, powered by one of the strongest labor markets on record and an elevated stock of household savings.”
When all else fails, you can count on Biden’s Ministry of Truth to swoop in and take care of what they do best.
With the midterms on the horizon, keep your eyes peeled for more dystopian redefining of other familiar words. Perhaps the definition of “elected” might need an update, or maybe even “citizen” – gotta tally up those votes somehow. One thing’s for sure – these radicals are nowhere near done with playing their word games.
Story cited here.
