Hello and welcome to the Byron York State Remote Shipchamp Podcast.

We'd like to get right into it.

And what we're going to get into today is the R word recession and the 2024 campaign,

and whether there will be a recession in the 2024 campaign.

You know that for a couple of years now, Republicans have been predicting that Joe Biden's

big spending policies are going to crash the United States economy.

There's going to be a recession, but it hasn't happened yet.

I mean, the country did experience two consecutive quarters of negative economic growth, which

is a widely accepted definition of recession in the first and second quarters of 2022.

So a lot of people, including me, you were ready to declare a recession, and then the economy

actually climbed back into positive growth territory in the next quarter.

And it has stayed there ever since.

Now it's not doing great.

It has been struggling for quite a while.

And the government reported a little while back that gross domestic product grew at a

very anemic 1.1 percent annual rate in the first quarter of 2023.

That has now been revised upward, but not a whole lot to 1.3 percent annual rate in

the first quarter of 2023.

Now when that first report came out, CNBC said growth in the United States slowed considerably

during the first three months of the year as interest rate increases and inflation took

hold of an economy largely expected to decelerate even further ahead.

Now if the economy is growing at 1.3 percent now and the rate is expected to decelerate

...