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Washington Post columnist Megan McArdle dismissed the semantic debate over whether the US is. officially in a recession and warned Democrats that such a “sharp word” on the state of the economy was not an effective political strategy.
In his article on Friday, titled “Enough of ‘Is this a recession?’ nonsense,” McArdle began by asking, “Are we in a recession? Does it matter?” He noted that “a preliminary report from the Bureau of Economic Analysis released Thursday shows the economy contracted at an annualized rate of 0.9 percent in the second quarter, after a 1.6 percent decline in the first quarter.” trimester”.
Two consecutive quarters of gross domestic product (GDP) negative Growth has traditionally been the technical definition of a recession.
McArdle noted: “So the pundits class launched into a fight over whether this really constitutes a recession. As with everything else these days, the debate (mostly) split along partisan lines and became so fierce that Wikipedia had to close its doors. entry into recessions to edits.”
President Biden has continued to insist that the United States is not in a recession.
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JOURNALISTS FROM POLITICO, CNN, MSNBC ROLL BACK THE DEFINITION OF RECESSION THEY PREVIOUSLY POSED
She defined both sides of the argument: “The right insists that, yes, we are obviously in a recession. What part of ‘two quarters of negative GDP growth’ do you not understand? The left points out that in reality, the official La American metric is based on a considerably more complicated cocktail of indicators”.
While McArdle suggested the turn coming from the democrats and the Biden White House “wasn’t unreasonable,” also admitting that it’s “probably not reasonable to spend a lot of time arguing about” the definition of a recession.
“The Biden administration has spent a lot of energy trying to manage perceptions of the economy,” the columnist observed. As an example, he reminded readers: “Remember when inflation was going to be ‘temporary’?”
McArdle examined how those Biden administration talking points didn’t shield President Biden from unpopularity: “Insisting that inflation was just a problem didn’t stop consumers from noticing that prices were rising. It also didn’t protect Biden approval ratingsthat sank even as management kept insisting that everything was fine.
Graph showing inflationary measures
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“To be fair, some would argue that when it comes to the economy, perceptions can become reality,” he acknowledged. “Thus, the theory goes, if you can prevent the media from speak ill of the economyWe could all be better.”
However, McArdle poured cold water on that notion: “You can’t message people because they think their economic circumstances have worsened, or because they worry this bodes badly for the future.” He concluded, “So all the spin efforts are likely to come to nothing.”
The columnist added that “it is emblematic of a dangerous tendency on the left to believe that they can control reality by controlling the words we use to describe it.” He then elaborated on “the left’s full-time obsession” with semantics.
“It is the left that has put us in an endless rut of euphemisms, turning ‘illegal alien’ into ‘illegal immigrant’ and then ‘undocumented worker’ and so on,” McArdle cited as an example. Referring to the findings by linguist Steven Pinker, explained that “this doesn’t work: the negative associations are attached to the underlying concept, not the vocabulary.”
FEBRUARY 21: Asylum seekers from Colombia, Venezuela and Cuba wait by the US border wall with Mexico to be processed by CBP on February 21, 2022 in Yuma, Arizona, United States. _____ US President Joe Biden speaks about lowering energy prices at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building in Washington, DC, USA, on Thursday, March 31, 2022. Photographer: Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images
She warned: “Meanwhile, the constant word churn alienates people who find the neologisms strange and off-putting, especially the less educated voters the Democrats are now bleeding.”
McArdle concluded the column by offering this advice to Democrats: “Sure, you can’t blame the Biden administration for trying to put a positive spin on things. But the rest of us, and especially Democrats, would be better off if the left spent less time looking for better phrases and more time finding solutions.”