Washington Goes Full Orwellian

An audacious communications campaign from Democrats in Washington is currently underway that is attempting to convince the public that:

  • There is no recession
  • Inflation has been vanquished
  • Even if inflation is still alive, targeted new Federal legislation will kill it

As strange as these claims sound to anyone with even the most casual grasp of reality, it is a testament to the post-factual world we now occupy that the Biden Administration is able to attempt, let alone succeed in, putting out such monumental fantasies.

The campaign began late in July when the Biden team attempted to redefine the word “recession.” While the left has always tried to redefine words (think “racism” or “gender”), it has never attempted it so spontaneously with such a technical definition. Typically, they let new definitions germinate in academia or policy think tanks before trotting them out for public consumption. That was the playbook that helped change the meaning of the word “inflation” (from its original understanding as an expansion of the money supply, to its current definition tied solely to rising prices). But the inflation campaign unfolded over decades and did not require the public to completely surrender its critical capacities.

I’ve been publicly commenting and writing about the economy for almost 30 years (and talking about it for essentially my entire six decades on the planet). Over that time, the technical definition of “recession” has never been in dispute. Of course, I’ve had many arguments over what caused any given recession, why recessions may be necessary to purge an economy from excesses and malinvestments caused by artificially low interest rates, what government responses should be to recessions, or why things were better or worse than a particular political party claimed them to be. But in that time, I never encountered anyone who quibbled with the accepted technical definition of “recession” as two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth. What would be the point? Recessions affected both political parties. Why change a definition when the original definition may suit you down the road?