THE BIDEN RECESSION. This morning the Commerce Department announced the economy shrank by 0.9% in the second quarter of 2022. That comes after the announcement last April that the economy contracted by 1.6% in the first quarter of this year. Now, the United States has had two consecutive quarters of negative economic growth, which is the popularly accepted definition of a recession. So it’s official: The U.S. is in a recession.

But it is not official. Denying long-standing standards, the Biden administration will not admit that the economy is in recession. For days leading up to the Commerce Department announcement, senior administration officials made the case that two quarters of negative growth do not necessarily equal a recession, and in this case, although such a situation is exceedingly rare, the economy has experienced two quarters of contraction yet is not in recession.