The Biden administration’s newfound reliance upon GDP exposes its transparent desperation less than five months before November’s presidential election. Whatever value GDP maintains in the abstract, everyday Americans remain more concerned with the day-to-day economic pain that they suffer in terms of food, housing and gas costs under Biden.

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Three years ago this month, unmistakable signs emerged that inflation was ascending out of control.  

The Biden administration, however, imperiously dismissed growing concerns and even insisted that everything was heading in the “right direction.”  

Consumer prices that month surged at a 5.4% annual rate, the highest since 2008, greatly exceeding economists’ forecasts.  That was four times the 1.4% rate that Biden inherited from Donald Trump less than five short months earlier.  

In a statement that obviously hasn’t aged well, White House Council of Economic Advisers member Heather Boushey asserted that, “Today’s data on inflation is the latest indicator that things are both moving in the right direction.”  The following month, Biden advisers infamously shifted to claiming that inflation was merely “transitory.”  

That was about the same time that Biden himself, the supposed steady hand and international relations wizard, also assured Americans that the Taliban wouldn’t regain control of Afghanistan following American withdrawal.  

Former White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki even callously made light of rising prices hitting consumers, joking about “the tragedy of the treadmill that’s delayed.”  

Instead, as we now know, inflation moved in the wrong direction and reached 9.1% in June 2022.  Today, three years later, overall consumer prices are a whopping 20% higher than when Biden entered office.  

Painfully higher prices, however, aren’t the only way in which Americans have suffered during the Biden era.  Responding to higher prices, the Federal Reserve was forced to raise interest rates, which in turn has led to record levels of credit card debt and unprecedented unaffordability of housing and rent.  

Further, as reported by Bloomberg this week, approximately two-thirds of middle-class Americans now report that “they are facing economic hardship and don’t anticipate a change for the rest of their lives.”  According to the survey on which it relied, some “40 percent of all Americans are unable to plan beyond their next paycheck, and 46 percent don’t have $500 saved for a rainy day.”  

Biden constantly claims that he’s rebuilding the economy “from the bottom up and the middle class out,” but the middle class itself obviously maintains a depressingly different perspective.  

In the face of that ongoing economic adversity, which explains why Biden now maintains the lowest approval rating of any president at this point in his tenure, he insists that “the American economy remains strong, with continued steady and stable growth.”  

Here’s the problem.  

In making that claim, Biden and his defenders rely upon gross domestic product (GDP) reports, which measure overall economic growth.  

Two years ago, however, the Biden administration denied the importance of that very same metric.  

Specifically, the U.S. economy entered an economic recession under the longstanding definition as two or more consecutive quarters of economic contraction.  According to official government data, the first quarter of 2022 registered a 2.0% contraction, and the second quarter 0.6%.  

To that point, Biden economic advisers like Jared Bernstein had publicly asserted as recently as 2019 that a recession “is typically defined as two consecutive quarters of declining growth.”  

When two consecutive quarters of declining growth subsequently occurred on Biden’s watch, however, they brazenly insisted that, “two consecutive quarters of GDP growth is not the technical definition of a recession.  It’s not the definition that economists have traditionally relied on.”  

So which is it?  

To the extent that Biden insists on citing GDP growth, it belies his recurring claim that he inherited a U.S. economy “flat on its back.”  After contractions of 5.3% and 28.0% in the first two quarters of 2020 as the Covid pandemic hit, the economy surged in the third quarter of 2020 by 34.8% and by 4.2% in the fourth quarter.  One year later, that had slowed to consecutive quarters of contraction and a recession under Biden.  

Accordingly, the Biden administration’s newfound reliance upon GDP exposes its transparent desperation less than five months before November’s presidential election.  Whatever value GDP maintains in the abstract, everyday Americans remain more concerned with the day-to-day economic pain that they suffer in terms of food, housing and gas costs under Biden.  

Time may have already expired to reverse that course before November, so expect more contradictions and hypocrisies from Biden and his defenders between now and then.