Tim Pawlenty, then Governor of Minnesota
The Wall Street Journal, OpEd, Dec. 13, 2010
For some reason, Republicans love to try to make unions, especially public employee unions, out to be the villain of their alternate reality narrative. Politifact gave T-Paw a pants-on-fire rating, the most severe category, reserved for calling the perpetrator of the false statement an outright liar.
Politifact.com wrote:
'Pawlenty wrote that government employees, especially those who are unionized, have become unfairly advantaged compared to private-sector workers, through a "silent coup, an inside job engineered by self-interested politicians and fueled by campaign contributions.
"Across the country, at every level of government, the pattern is the same: Unionized public employees are making more money, receiving more generous benefits, and enjoying greater job security than the working families forced to pay for it with ever-higher taxes, deficits and debt," Pawlenty wrote. He even repeated what has become a major Republican talking point -- that "federal employees receive an average of $123,049 annually in pay and benefits, twice the average of the private sector."
"The majority of union members today no longer work in construction, manufacturing or 'strong back' jobs," Pawlenty wrote. "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 8 million jobs while local, state and federal governments added 590,000."
Remember, these are 'pants-on-fire' lies, not honest factually inaccurate statements. Let me remind our readers that the current crop of Republicans don't have any of those 'new ideas' they kept promising they were going to unveil.....eventually. All they have are the failed policies of George W. Bush, and in a few cases, the failed trickle-down policies of Ronald Reagan, vehemently being discredited by their designer, David Stockman. These lies are the set up for the ill-informed to be sold another pack of the same lies by the incoming members of Congress, much like the nonsense spouted by that other inaccurate Republican from Minnesota, Michele Bachmann. It's not a coincidence that TPaw is the writer; this is part of his set up for his presidential bid. TPaw is not popular in Minnesota as a presidential candidate; his only hope is to go outside of Minnesota - travel which has characterized his last term as governor.
Back to the politifact.com analysis of Pawlenty's claims.
In January 2008, total private-sector employment in the United States stood at 115,562,000. By November 2010, the most current month available, that number had sunk to 108,278,000 -- a drop of roughly 7.3 million jobs. That pretty close to the "nearly 8 million" figure that Pawlenty cited. (Almost two-thirds of those job losses, incidentally, happened while George W. Bush was president.)
But Pawlenty's public-sector figures were problematic. The BLS 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.
At first we were flummoxed about how Pawlenty got the numbers so wrong. We called BLS to make sure we weren't overlooking another data set that measured the same subject, and spokesman Gary Steinberg confirmed that we were using exactly the same numbers he would use.
We also looked at federal employment trends over the same period, on the guess that Pawlenty might have meant to refer to federal jobs, rather than all government jobs. By this calculation, the number of jobs did increase, rather than decrease, but the amount was only one-sixth of what Pawlenty had indicated. Over that period, federal employment rose from 2,739,000 to 2,837,000 -- 98,000 jobs in all.
