The Recession is Over?

More propaganda… I'm not sure where he dug up these people but it seems that Obama has found some economists who are willing to say the most ridiculous things. They saying that the recession ended in June of 2009. They say this based on an economic description of the end of a recession. To an economist this is when an economy shows 2 consecutive quarters of Growth. If this happened in 2009 then why did it take them more than a year to discover this fact. Weren't these numbers out in July of 2009? Yet the media doesn't question the numbers at all or how they came up with them; instead they resort to what it feels like and the rate of unemployment. It would seem those in the media don't have enough common sense to determine that what these guys are trying to feed us is nothing more than propaganda.

These things ought to be challenged by the media, but they cannot be bothered to do their own research or be truly educated on these things so instead they just behave like the talking heads they are. They simply continue to spit out whatever they are told as though it was the truth. It is certainly not the truth but it ought to make anyone wonder how they only discovered these numbers now. They ought to be asking these guys why they're just coming out with this revelation now only a little more than a month out from the elections?

Even if it were the case that the technical term for recession and its end were 2 months in a row of positive growth what about all the intervening months and was there growth then? What about the definition for what makes a recession? Did we fall back into one? I think it may be the case, but of course no one is reporting any of this because they don't seem to know how to use Google, or the encyclopedia.

To say that GDP went up cannot be the only thing we look at. To do that is too view it in a vacuum in which it doesn't exist. During that same period of time national debt skyrocketed. Think of it this way. It is as much as to say the economy of a household is looking much better because the husband got a slight raise but ignoring the fact that the household spending so outstrips that raise that things are far worse now then they were before.

Obama would have us ignore these other facts and realized that due to a couple of quarters of Growth in GDP that he could declare an end to the recession. This is nothing more than misdirection. It is ignoring the fact that our spending has so outstripped the growth in our economy that it is worse than it was before by far! Some GDP models include the spending as part of their calculation but some do not. Since no information of which model was being used to declare the recession over has been stated we are only left to wonder which one their using. This too is another thing the media can't be bothered to find out.

It seems that both they and we are so eager to hear any shred of good news that we're willing to accept whatever they tell us even though we know it defies common sense. This is supposed to be the job of the media. They are supposed to find out these things for us and to help explain them for those not familiar with the concepts, but once again we have a media that is asleep at the wheel.

By all means do not believe what the media tells you when they tell you the recession is over. If all they can do is make the statement with the simplest of explanations that it is two quarters with positive GDP and no further explanation then you can be sure they haven't looked into it at all and are simply reporting what they were told in some sound bite.

We need people who will begin to do their own research and be truly investigative like we had during WaterGate. Consider how quickly they dropped the investigation of Sestak bribery situation.