Pawlenty attack on public sector unions rated ‘Pants on Fire’ wrong
Thursday, December 16, 2010 at 1:25 pm
- 6 Comments
Gov. Tim Pawlenty got it wrong in his weekend Wall Street Journal piece that decried a perceived growth in public sector jobs and high pay for government employees, according to the St. Petersburg Times’ Politifact: “Not only did he apparently mangle the time frame, contradict his own definition of federal workers and fail to acknowledge the huge caveat of Census worker hiring, he also repeated a statistic that had been criticized as inaccurate as long as six months ago.”
Pawlenty wrote, “The majority of union members today no longer work in construction, manufacturing or ‘strong back’ jobs. They work for government, which, thanks to President Obama, has become the only booming ‘industry’ left in our economy. Since January 2008 the private sector has lost nearly eight million jobs while local, state and federal governments added 590,000.”
Politifact fact-checkers said that they couldn’t figure out where Pawlenty got those numbers, but the data they were able to gather revealed something much different.
But Pawlenty’s public-sector figures were problematic. The BLS [Bureau of Labor Statistics] has a category called government employment — which encapsulates local, state and federal employment, just as Pawlenty had defined it. Over the same period, the number of government jobs went from 22,379,000 to 22,261,000 — a decrease of 118,000, rather than an increase of 590,000, as Pawlenty had written.
The site notes that Pawlenty seems to have included temporary Census workers from 2009 and that under any measure, his number is wildly inflated.
The comparison of job growth he made — which showed the size of the federal workforce going in exactly the opposite direction as it did in reality — is a key pillar supporting the premise of his column, that government work is “the only booming ‘industry’ left in our economy.” Pawlenty’s number is so compromised that we rate his statement Pants on Fire!
The flap is not without a sense of irony: At one point in his editorial, Pawlenty tells the government to “get the numbers right.”
Follow Andy Birkey on Twitter6 Comments
Comment posted December 16, 2010 @ 3:34 pm
One little prick and the windbag is deflated. How nice to see.
Comment posted December 17, 2010 @ 4:28 pm
But …. just like accusations made on Fox Network …. the lie travels half way around the world before the truth gets it’s pants on. Mr. Pawlenty’s false accustions will reverberate through the conservative chattering class, impervious to correction by evidence and fact.
And if the government is the evil that he suggests, then he is as much to blame as anybody, having headed the public sector in Minnesota as governor. He stains his own reputation with his lies about public sector growth
People who hate government so much should stay far away from it, criticize it from a far, where they do less damage to the poor needing healthcare, children needing education, victims needing criminal justice, and citizens needing transportation options.
Comment posted December 19, 2010 @ 5:56 pm
This loser makes his side kick palin look good and that my folks is damn hard to do.
Comment posted December 20, 2010 @ 8:37 am
“”Pawlenty wrote, “The majority of union members today no longer work in construction, manufacturing or ‘strong back’ jobs. They work for government, which, thanks to President Obama, has become the only booming ‘industry’ left in our economy. Since January 2008 the private sector has lost nearly eight million jobs while local, state and federal governments added 590,000.””"
In the Bush/ Pawelnty era we LOST OVER 47,000 FACTORIES to China and India!! We have LOST over 7Million jobs in America. Those “Strong Back” union jobs have been completely GUTTED in our country.. When it comes to job loss in this country Republitards look the other way until the issue becomes politically feasible and then they start pointing there fingers at the Unions..
God I HATE Republicans!
Comment posted December 26, 2010 @ 11:17 am
The Pawlenty “Renewable Energy Act” is a sham. The European Union created a “Wind Energy” bubble and poured billions of dollars into the program to “create jobs, stimulate the economies of Spain, Greece, Portugal….” The bubble on the false industry burst this past year: 40,0000 jobs have been lost so far and the EU went shopping for a 16 billion euro bailout. In steps Tim Pawlenty and his merry band of corporate thieves tied to Enron, which bought Zond Corporation to become Enron Wind, which was sold to GE Wind, with the contracts for massive fake “renewable energy/wind” contracts with Northern States Power being transferred with each sale. We now have GE Wind partnered with AWA Goodhue for the controversial Goodhue Wind Project being fought by Goodhue County officials and residents. Like Enron, National Wind (tied to AWA) is based out of Houston. Tim Pawlenty runs about the campaign trail playing the corporate “loot”; loot, loot, looting taxpayers in this state and others, all on behalf of corporate cronies who he thinks will help him rise to the Presidency. But is he worse than Obama or any other politician? Me thinks not.
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