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CV NEWS FEED // Two economists reported that after adjusting government statistics to more accurately measure inflation, it became clear that the country has been in a recession for the past two years under the Biden-Harris administration.
Heritage Foundation Research Fellow EJ Antoni and Mises Institute Fellow Peter St Onge compiled the report for the Brownstone Institute for Social and Economic Research, a think tank that supports individual rights.
“When you correct government inflation statistics, it turns out we’ve been in recession since 2022,” St Onge wrote in an X (formerly Twitter) post unveiling the study last week.
In the conclusion of their report, Antoni and St Onge state that this finding is “in stark contrast to the establishment narrative that the US economy is enjoying robust growth that for some reason the public is incapable of perceiving.”
“Indeed, our results are consistent with the perceptions of the American public, of whom a majority believe we are in recession,” the economists pointed out.
In the runup to next month’s election, polls have consistently indicated that the economy is the issue that most voters consider an important factor in deciding their vote.
A Pew Research survey from last month found that over eight in ten voters – including 93% of Trump supporters and 68% of Harris supporters – consider the economy a very important factor in casting their November 5 ballots.
“If it feels like a recession you are not alone,” St Onge stated in a video he posted on X this week.
The economist noted that he and Antoni “made several pretty obvious adjustments to the deceptive way official statistics calculate inflation.”
“Together, these nearly double inflation during Biden-Harris taking it up from 20.9% in the official so-called ‘GDP deflator’ to 39.9%,” he said.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), the GDP deflator “measures changes in the prices of goods and services produced in the United States, including those exported to other countries.” The BEA is an agency of the U.S. Department of Commerce.
In explaining his and Antoni’s adjustments, St Onge highlighted that official government statistics “don’t measure the cost of owning a house.”
“Instead, they use a convoluted lagged indicator based on rent,” he said, “almost like they’re trying to hide it.”
Antoni posted a line chart to X showing that the Real Average Weekly Earnings had dramatically crashed in early 2022, just over a year into the Biden-Harris presidency – and had yet to come close to recovering to its level when the administration took office in January 2021.
“You feel worse off today than 4 years ago b/c you are,” he wrote in the accompanying post. “You can afford about 3.4% less despite earning more money, working additional jobs, longer hours, etc. You’re doing that additional work for the gov’t as you pay the hidden tax of inflation.”
“The average weekly paycheck has never been larger, but it buys less than it did in Jan ’21,” Antoni wrote in another X post featuring a line chart. “Put simply, we’ve gone backwards.”
In a third X post, Antoni confronted claims by sitting vice president and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris that the runaway inflation rampant under her and President Joe Biden’s administration was caused by “corporate greed” and “price gouging.”
The economist wrote: “If ‘corporate greed’ and ‘price gouging’ caused inflation, then why have prices paid by businesses and consumers both risen the same (20%) since Jan ’21?”
“In fact,” he added, “businesses were eating a lot of those costs in ’22 and consumer prices didn’t catch up until [within] the last year.”
In August, Harris proposed a heavily scrutinized policy she called the “first-ever federal ban on price gouging” for groceries.
The proposal was widely panned by critics from across the political spectrum, with many comparing it to price control policies historically implemented under communist and socialist regimes.
“We’ve seen this kind of thing tried in lots of other countries before: Venezuela, Argentina, the Soviet Union, etc.,” columnist Catherine Rampell said at the time. “It leads to shortages. It leads to black markets.”
>> HARRIS UNVEILS ECONOMIC AGENDA INCLUDING PRICE CONTROLS <<
“Many have questioned the accuracy of official inflation statistics, with dozens of academic papers written on the topic and doubts voiced by sources ranging from the New York Times to former President Donald Trump,” Antoni and St Onge indicated at the beginning of their report:
This matters not only because of the political salience of rising prices, but also because official inflation numbers are used to calculate real economic growth by adjusting nominal dollars to inflation-adjusted dollars.
…
The government metrics for inflation suffer from various problems which tend to underestimate the rise in prices over time. These shortcomings have been more pronounced over the last four years during a relatively rapid depreciation of the currency.
In a video uploaded the day the report was released, St Onge declared: “The media’s beloved strong Biden economy is a lie.”
“The blockbuster economic statistics we are spoonfed are manipulated into relevance,” he declared:
GDP numbers that count ammo to Ukraine or hundreds of billions in migrant welfare as if it were making us rich, jobs numbers that intentionally skip millions of Americans who’ve given up on the labor force while importing millions of migrants to replace them, retail numbers that fail to account for inflation.
And of course the human cost: seniors going back to work or giving up on ever retiring, record [numbers of] young people who are jobless, living at home, who have given up on building a future who have checked out.
Readers can find Antoni and St Onge’s full report here.
