GDP Report Is Bad News For Republican Recession Claims
All summer, Republicans claimed the U.S. economy was in a recession because the country’s overall economic growth went negative for the first half of the year.McCarthy and others argued that two quarters of negative growth automatically amounted to a recession — even though recessions usually involve mass job loss , not just negative growth . And there’s been nothing but rapid job growth this year.The positive growth doesn’t mean there’s no recession lurking around the corner ― but it does mean that if one had already started this year, it was really mild, involved no widespread layoffs, and the unemployment rate remained near historic lows the entire time.“For months, doomsayers have been arguing that the U.S. economy is in a recession and congressional Republicans have been rooting for a downturn,” Biden said. “But today we got further evidence that our economic recovery is continuing to power forward.”But declaring a recession has always involved a lot more than one simple data point. The Business Cycle Dating Committee at the National Bureau of Economic Research , a private nonprofit organization, keeps the official score of when recessions start and end.The NBER calls recessions after the fact, so if one had happened earlier this year, they wouldn’t have said so at the time. But as they explain on their website, they look at much more than just GDP, such as measures of personal income, employment, consumer spending and industrial production . And they even state that “real GDP could decline by relatively small amounts in two consecutive quarters without warranting” a recession call.Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.), chair of the Joint Economic Committee, said the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis , which produces the GDP numbers, is staffed by conscientious career economists, not a bunch of Democrats. He said it was unfortunate Republicans continuously denigrate institutions.“This goes along with, ‘You can’t trust the FBI. You can’t trust [the Department of] Justice, the IRS is out to screw you.’ The whole thought of not trusting the institutions that make our country the best in the world,” Beyer told HuffPost.
McCarthy and others argued that two quarters of negative growth automatically amounted to a recession — even though recessions usually involve mass job loss, not just negative growth. The Business Cycle Dating Committee at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a private nonprofit organization, keeps the official score of when recessions start and end.
The NBER calls recessions after the fact, so if one had happened earlier this year, they wouldn’t have said so at the time.
