Telling It Like It Is

I enjoy watching Tucker Carlson. He is generally very direct and very informative. Thursday night was no exception.

The Daily Caller posted part of Tucker Carlson’s Thursday monologue:

“That sound that you’re hearing is the goalpost moving,” Carlson said as he recapped efforts by reporters, media outlets and Biden administration officials to redefine recession. Back-to-back quarters of negative GDP growth is one rule of thumb used to determine if a recession is taking place, according to Investopedia.

“This is from Politico,” Carlson said, “‘The White House is pretty obviously right that even two quarters of shrinking GDP would not show the economy is currently in a recession.’ That’s the word from Ben White, who is the chief economics reporter at Politico. He is backed up by The Associated Press, which is totally real. Just today the AP reported that ‘the U.S. economy shrank for a second straight quarter, raising fears the nation may be approaching a recession.’ We’re getting close now!”

“In other words, two declining quarters of growth is not a recession, just like the White House said,” Carlson continued. “That sounds definitive. It’s always been that way. As long as you don’t have a memory that extends past, say, last week, because just a few weeks ago, before the White House declared otherwise, everyone was saying differently, including Ben White and the AP.”

GDP shrank by 0.9% in the second quarter, according to data released Thursday from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, after the economy contracted by 1.4% in the first quarter. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre called the data a “transition” in a clip played by Carlson.

“This is the transition to green energy and renewables,” Carlson said. “Joe Biden announced it today. It’s a transition to handing China our energy grid. Oh, that’s a ‘transition.’ Some might call it the collapse of empire and a subsequent disaster where we are ruled by people who hate us. No, it’s a transition in which China gets to make and control the wind turbines, the lithium, the solar panels.”

And that, folks, is where we are.

Are You Going To Believe What He Says Or What You See?

On Thursday, The Daily Caller reported the following:

President Joe Biden insists the U.S. is on the “right path” as the GDP report released Thursday shows two consecutive quarters of falling GDP which, by some definitions, indicates the economy is headed toward a recession.

The U.S. real GDP decreased at an annual rate of 0.9% in the second quarter of 2022, data released Thursday from the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) shows. Biden said Thursday that the report is not surprising and the U.S. is in a transition period.

What we have seen in the past eighteen months or so is what happens when you reverse the policies of a successful businessman and replace them with policies dreamed up by a bunch of academics with questionable qualifications for the positions they hold. The policies that were responsible for the growth we saw under President Trump were almost immediately reversed by President Biden when he took office. In his first three days in office, President Biden signed 30 executive orders, seventeen on his first day. In April, 2017, CBS New reported the following, “Since he took office on Jan. 20, President Trump has signed a total of 77 executive actions — including 25 presidential memoranda, 24 presidential proclamations, and 29 executive orders, which are published in the federal register.”

The article concludes:

The Biden administration has consistently pushed back on claims the economy is in, or heading toward, a recession, publishing a recent blog post that argues that two consecutive quarters of falling GDP is not indicative of a recession. The National Bureau of Economic Research uses several factors to determine whether the U.S. is in a recession. Economist Julius Shiskin wrote in 1974 that two consecutive quarters of declining GDP is a good rule of thumb to define a recession. The definition has become somewhat of a standard, though other factors should be considered.

E.J. Antoni, research fellow for regional economics at The Heritage Foundation, told the Daily Caller News Foundation that technical definitions matter naught if Americans can feel it in their pockets.

“At the end of the day the average American family has been going through economic pain for the last 18 months; paychecks are going out the door faster than they’re coming in because of inflation, credit card debt is getting more expensive to service, regular folks can’t afford a home, gas and grocery prices are going up. In my opinion, if you go out and talk to regular Americans it is so blatantly obvious the economy is contracting.”

Americans are feeling the changes that have occurred in Washington. This is not the government our Founding Fathers envisioned. The federal government was supposed to be weak and the states were supposed to be strong. We are upside-down right now in our power structure. Right now we are have an elite class of politicians who are ignoring the interests of the Americans who elected them. That needs to change.

The Predictable Truth

The White House and the media have worked very hard to sell the idea that the economy is in good shape and that inflation really isn’t that bad; and if it is that bad, it’s because the economy is growing. They have also attempted to convince Americans that the supply line crisis is due to Covid. Hopefully Americans are waking up to the fact that neither one of those things is true.

On Wednesday, The Conservative Treehouse posted an article that provides a much more honest assessment of where the American economy actually is. It is a rather long article, so I suggest that you follow the link and read the entire article. I will try to summarize some of the major points.

The article reports:

The business and financial wires are melting down today as ADP Payrolls, the nation’s largest private sector payroll providing service, releases data from January showing a drop of 301,000 jobs.  [ADP Raw Data Here]

The financial, economic and business pundits are completely caught off guard and using the words “shocked”, “unexpected” and “surprised,” within their analysis.  These employment numbers just don’t align with an economy growing at 6.9%, as measured by the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA).  However, for CTH readers who have carefully scrutinized the economic claims and looked at the bigger picture through the prism of kitchen table checkbook economics, these results are not a surprise.

Every sector of the employment picture on Main Street USA is hit.  The pundits, following the narrative first seeded by the White House on Monday, are pointing to Omicron as the justification inside their review.  That’s nonsense.  For the better part of seven months these same pundits first claimed Delta, then shifted to Omicron as a way to explain the structurally weak economy.  All of that is nonsense.

What we are witnessing are the outcomes of massive inflation now hitting the labor market.  A drop in demand, and a subsequent drop in the employment of goods and services, is an unavoidable outcome of inflationary pressure on wages.

Let me say it again, on a macro level, natural consumer DEMAND has dropped – we are only now starting to see it surfacing in the statistical measures.

This is why White House spokesperson Jen Psaki made that weird statement on Monday.

The article concludes:

We are in the inflation hurricane right now.

The good news is… if domestic demand continues naturally contracting, due to unsustainable inflation, eventually prices will have to stabilize. It seems counterintuitive, but a strong cash position is valuable despite inflation right now.

Inflation will continue hitting wages hard, but there is light at the end of the tunnel. If you have prepared to ride out this storm of inflation, we should see things start to turn around in about six months. Unfortunately, between now and then, there will be significant job losses as inventories continue to build and sales get stagnant.

Prices on fast turn consumable goods like food, fuel, energy etc. will never return to their pre-inflationary price. The high prices on highly consumable products are here to stay and will never decline. Unfortunately, there are several indicators that those prices will go even higher throughout the next six months until they plateau mid-summer.

However, on the backside of this inflationary hurricane, the prices on long-term durable goods will start dropping sooner as consumer demand continues to focus on prioritization of spending and employment becomes more tenuous.

Please read the entire article. It includes a couple of charts that illustrate exactly what is happening to our economy under the economic policies of the Biden administration.