Last month, the Department of Commerce released troubling data on the anemic economy, showing that gross domestic income (GDI) shrank in the previous six months. That’s no surprise to half of Americans who believe we’re currently in a recession, but the data refute President Joe Biden’s claim that the economy is “strong as hell.”
And according to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen’s own words from last year, the economy is back in recession.
There are different ways of measuring the health and size of the economy, like gross domestic product (GDP) and GDI. While GDP measures total production, GDI measures total income. In theory, GDP and GDI should be the same because they measure the two sides of every transaction. In practice, though, there are slight differences in how the data are collected, which leaves some room for interpretation.
