The White House preempted the release of second quarter GDP estimates in a blog post cautioning that "two consecutive quarters of falling real GDP" is neither an official definition of recession nor the primary mechanism by which experts diagnose the economy's health. Media figures ranging from L.A. Times writers to Wikipedia editors soon joined an all-hands campaign to push a single message: GDP cannot singularly signal a recession. As broken clocks are apt, these writers are technically correct — if not entirely honest.

Gross Domestic Product is a flawed metric, distorted in its nature. As defined by the OECD, GDP is the total value of all goods and services sold in a country during a certain period. In short, it measures consumption — irrespective of whether the consumer is an individual or an entity. And as consumers go, governments — in contrast to their eternally belt-ratcheting citizenry — are notoriously spendthrift. While inflation-weary consumers drained their savings and shifted all their discretionary dollars toward budget goods and necessities to survive the pandemic, the federal government's contributions to GDP only grew. The U.S. government was responsible for nearly 30% of all spending in 2021.

Trying to diagnose a nation's economic prospects by its consumption is a dubious enough proposition; to attempt the same without excluding the balance sheets of wildly intemperate government agencies yields results as sure as measurements made with an elastic ruler. The measurements are always wrong; they are also always inflated.