What a difference a press release makes, even when it is only talking about the past.
As we rolled out of bed on July 28, economists surveyed by The Wall Street Journal were confident that U.S. economic output grew 0.3 percent in the second quarter.
But then came the witching hour of 8:30 a.m. New York time when the Commerce Department released the world’s most important number. Gross domestic product (GDP) had contracted in the 2nd quarter by 0.9 percent. We might as well make it easy and say it: 1 percent.
That fall not only outstrips expectations, it’s also vastly worse than even the most pessimistic of forecasts. Later adjustments could even worsen the numbers, as happened in the first quarter. Is it a recession? That depends. To paraphrase Groucho Marx: Who are you going to believe, the Biden administration or your own eyes?
If you paid attention in economics class, you know that a recession is typically defined as two successive quarters of decline in real output (“real” meaning adjusted for inflation). The Biden administration says that the current moment in no way qualifies, on the grounds that the labor market is healthy as measured by the unemployment rate. You can only believe that if you pay no attention to the labor participation rate, which is falling at the same pace as the value of the dollar.
Confidence has been shattered in our economic lives, but even more so in the public attitude toward government and its leaders. The idea that Biden’s economy can self-identify as growing and that’s all we are supposed to believe is a new level of absurdity. Economic reality serves as a useful break from post-structuralist fantasies.
Another hint of the spin over the coming days is that this decline is only transitory. We have heard that before. The transitory inflation of the past two years has already stolen 14 cents of domestic value out of every dollar.
Of course, there is also the old saw of the pandemic that can be blamed for the carnage. It certainly appears that the whole COVID bit is ramping up again on Pennsylvania Avenue.
Wearing a black mask outdoors now for some apparent reason, President Joseph Biden emerged from his bout with COVID to make a trek to the White House lawn for another teleprompter oration. While hundreds of millions of people the world over have weathered COVID, Biden is the only person who credited his own political priorities for his recovery.
Implausibly invoking a counterfactual that he can’t know, he credited his four shots for his mostly mild case, plus another magic pill from his favorite company Pfizer, a medicine already known for temporarily suppressing symptoms but not rooting out the problem. Consistent with two and a half years of near silence, no mention was made of any contribution the immune system might have made.
Biden further bragged that the federal government has permitted pharmacists to directly prescribe this medicine, bypassing doctors entirely. And this comes after two anti-COVID repurposed therapeutics used the world over—hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin—were widely banned from distribution by U.S. pharmacies, even with a doctor’s prescription.
Adding to the transparent pitch for Big Pharma, Biden proceeded as if in a time warp to promote more mask-wearing indoors, while urging us all to do our part to “slow the spread.” This was remarkable on all counts because the evidence of the effectiveness of mask-wearing is thin to non-existent, while the slow-the-spread slogan is lacking in any point whatsoever.
Why precisely should we still be slowing the spread? Close observers of virus mutation patterns observe that the imposed delays of herd immunity only ended up selecting for ever more prevalent variants. The only plausible rationale for this prattle early on was to conserve hospital space, but that too turned out to be a miscalculation. More than 300 hospitals ended up furloughing nurses because they had too few patients. The parking lots stood empty as elective surgeries and routine checkups disappeared under government edict.
But to hear Biden talk, it was all science in action. Don’t forget that the Biden administration is still appealing the federal court decision that emancipated America’s travelers from an unconstitutional mask mandate. The whole country cheered in relief, save a small percentage of people permanently affiliated with germophobia. The White House was deaf to the shouts of elation and proceeded to deploy every legal mechanism to force us back into face coverings.
And it’s this very team of people who have mucked up the science so egregiously for so long and at unfathomable cost, that’s now celebrating a new “climate change” deal in Congress. The bill for this spending spree is $369 billion. Even the news reports on the supposed great news make it clear that this is all about pork and vote trading. The swing vote of West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin was purchased by permitting his state to step up the transportation of natural gas out of his state to a neighboring one, plus an informal commitment to back the Mountain Valley Pipeline.
It might at first seem strange that a bill to dish out big bucks for energy produced by wind and sun would also liberalize natural gas markets and even open up some old-fashioned drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. But that’s Washington at work. If the spend-and-borrow numbers are high enough, no one cares about the contradictions. Or even whether the policies work to achieve their aims.
Still, The New York Times assures us that this massive spending bill will help the government achieve its great climate goals. After all, they say, the average temperature has risen by 2 degrees Fahrenheit over the past 100 years, which, they further assure us, is the fault of industrial prosperity. To be sure, the average person only lived 30 to 40 years in 1800. During the same century that these people claim we’ve been burning up the planet, our average lives lengthened from 40 to 75 years.
Even granting the sketchy claim that your car and barbecue grill are causing the planet to overheat, one might suppose that life extension would be celebrated as a good thing, rather than a climate catastrophe that cries out for the wholesale dismantling of industrial civilization. But truly, there’s no making sense of these people anymore. They are ready to shell out hundreds of billions to take over arable acreage with solar panels even as we face a food crisis, and festoon the countryside with bird-slaughtering windmills rather than permit more pipelines and refineries to open.
The emergency of our times is undeniable, as is the solution of putting a hard stop on the insanity of government spending, money printing, controls, and impositions that are killing economic growth and shortening life spans. But it’s no longer clear whether the current regime has a connection to reality at all. The current plan seems to be to wreck as much as possible before they are all swept out of office.
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