Who can trust any of the stats that the government comes up with these days? For instance, how many of the millions employed directly by the State, and millions more indirectly as contractors, are doing something truly productive, something that’s actually needed and wanted?
Many of them are just pointlessly digging ditches during the day and filling those ditches up at night.
by Doug Casey
International Man: Recently, the Biden administration tried to change the traditional definition of a recession which is “two consecutive quarters of decline in a country’s GDP.”
The new definition of a recession is more vague and is “a significant decline in economic activity that is spread across the economy and lasts more than a few months.”
What’s your take on this?
Doug Casey: Odd. It sounds like the definition of a depression, not a recession that I’ve used for years.
Words shape thoughts, and thoughts shape beliefs. That was a major theme in Orwell’s book 1984. The government consistently changed the meaning of words, labeling some as “bad think” or “thought crime.” 1984 is the ultimate evolution of cancel culture, PC, wokeism, and the like.
It’s critical that words be defined and used precisely. If definitions are nebulous and can be changed at will, it becomes hard to communicate. The closer we come to redefining “blue” as “red,” or “war” as “peace,” or “recession” as “prosperity,” the closer we come to literally not knowing what we’re talking about.
Politicos don’t like the word “recession.” You may recall when Alfred Kahn, Jimmy Carter’s chief economic advisor, joked he’d rename a recession a “banana” because the word wouldn’t scare people so much. During the last depression, Roosevelt said that “All we have to fear is fear itself.” But that was totally untrue. What the country really had to fear was his destructive policies.
As for the definition of a recession, their previous “two-quarters of decline in GDP” was arbitrary—but at least it allowed everyone who juggled economic numbers to use a meaningful shorthand. Though frankly, who can even be sure what the GDP even is with trillions of new fiat dollars injected into the economy? And the value of the currency fluctuating wildly against everything?
Even by the government’s own inaccurate figures, the currency is losing value at nearly 10% per year. It’s hard for even an honest observer to put his finger on what a recession is when a currency is dropping radically by an indeterminate amount.
Who can trust any of the stats that the government comes up with these days? For instance, how many of the millions employed directly by the State, and millions more indirectly as contractors, are doing something truly productive, something that’s actually needed and wanted?
Many of them are just pointlessly digging ditches during the day and filling those ditches up at night.
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