RECESSION AND THE 2024 CAMPAIGN. For more than two years now, Republicans have been predicting that President Joe Biden‘s big-spending policies will crash the U.S. economy into recession. It hasn’t happened yet, although the country did experience two consecutive quarters of negative economic growth, a widely accepted definition of a recession, in the first and second quarters of 2022. But the economy climbed back into positive growth territory in the next quarter and has stayed there since.

Now, it’s struggling. Well, it’s always been struggling, but now it is more clearly struggling. The government reports that GDP grew at an anemic 1.1% annual rate in the first quarter of 2023. “Growth in the U.S. slowed considerably during the first three months of the year as interest rate increases and inflation took hold of an economy largely expected to decelerate even further ahead,” reported CNBC.