As the Biden administration continues its efforts to redefine what constitutes a recession, it looks like they have a familiar big-tech ally backing them.
Facebook recently advanced the president’s misleading recession narrative by “fact-checking” a post written by top economist Phillip Magness, the research and education director at the American Institute for Economic Research, after he stated that America is now in a recession.
The post – which is no longer visible – was marked by Facebook’s fact checkers as being “misleading.”
Magness responded to blatant efforts to censor the truth about America’s recession – slamming the move as “Orwellian.”
“We live in an Orwellian hell-scape. Facebook is now ‘fact checking’ anyone who questions the White House’s word-games about the definition of a recession,” Magness stated.
The economist then added, “Recession. n. 1. 2 consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth when the media dislikes the president. 2. A vague, holistic, ill-defined condition that you aren’t allowed to talk about until the NBER makes a determination a year from now, provided the media likes the president.”
The White House issued a fact sheet back on July 21st which claimed that the determination of whether there was a recession was not “holistic.”
The White House stated in that sheet, “What is a recession? While some maintain that two consecutive quarters of falling real GDP constitute a recession, that is neither the official definition nor the way economists evaluate the state of the business cycle.”
They continued, “Instead, both official determinations of recessions and economists’ assessment of economic activity are based on a holistic look at the data—including the labor market, consumer and business spending, industrial production, and incomes.”
The fact sheet concluded, “Based on these data, it is unlikely that the decline in GDP in the first quarter of this year—even if followed by another GDP decline in the second quarter—indicates a recession.”
Magness, for his part, recently penned a Wall Street Journal op-ed titled “A Recession by Any Other Name,” which was published on July 27.
Magness wrote that the NBER is not the “official arbiter of recessions.” Magness argued that the federal government has often used the general definition preferred by most lay people.
“Rather than tackling the underlying economic problems, the White House is playing word games,” he stated. “The White House’s attempt to wordsmith its way around a recession shows the dangers of politicizing economic terms.”
He added: “Mr. Biden’s economic advisers are trying to buy time by exploiting NBER’s otherwise defensible methodology. They hope doing so will insulate the administration from the electoral backlash in the event of a downturn.”
Meanwhile, Biden’s Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has suggested the economic slowdown is a “positive” thing that Americans should be happy about.
But the administration’s attempts to deceive the American public for their own political gain could prove to be rather dangerous, especially to those who fall for the Democrats’ blatant lies about the state of the economy.
I am in FB lock-down these past thirty day-it continues-for an infraction – I know not – The Fact Checkers didn’t say what I did to be banned-here is what they did say….—- Review requested—
If we find that your posts or comments didn’t follow our Community Standards, your account will remain disabled.
We’re always looking out for the security of people on Facebook, so while your posts and comments are reviewed you can’t use Facebook. Can you believe this crap. Everything I’ve ever posted on FB has been cut and pasted from that account. Is Zuckerberg against free speech in America???