We’re more than a year-and-a-half into Joe Biden’s presidency, with full second-quarter economic growth numbers from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis now in hand. Which seems like as good a time as any for another installment in my occasional series comparing growth rates under U.S. presidents — which somewhat to my surprise shows Biden on pace to compile by far the best growth record since Bill Clinton.
Yes, this is adjusted for inflation, albeit using the gross domestic product price index, which hasn’t been rising quite as fast as the better-known consumer price index (7.6% year-over-year in the second quarter versus 8.6% for the CPI). And yes, I measure growth here using not GDP alone but the average of GDP and another metric tracked by the BEA, gross domestic income. In theory GDP and GDI should be equal, but they are estimated from different sources and so far this year are showing very different economic trajectories for the U.S. GDP fell at a 1.6% annualized rate in the first quarter and 0.6% in the second, according to the latest BEA estimates, while GDI rose 1.8% and 1.4%.
There have been a lot of complaints lately that the Biden administration and the media are shifting the goalposts on how recessions are defined by looking past those two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth to other indicators such as payroll employment, industrial production and real incomes that show continued growth. In reality, the National Bureau of Economic Research has been the semi-official arbiter of when U.S. recessions start and end since well before there was such a thing as GDP, and economists there have continued to focus on data series more frequent and less susceptible to subsequent revision than the quarterly GDP numbers.
