PolitiFact: Pawlenty's Pants are on Fire

Posted at 12:18 PM on December 16, 2010 by Tom Scheck (4 Comments)
Filed under: Tim Pawlenty

PolitFact, a fact checking unit, says Gov. Pawlenty's recent Wall St. Journal editorial is filled with inaccuracies and gave it a "Pants on Fire" ranking. There's no worse ranking out there. The op-ed focused on the salary and benefits of government workers.

"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.

Politifact says Pawlenty's facts are wrong.

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. (Another politician who got caught by PolitiFact Ohio was the incoming House Speaker, John Boehner, R-Ohio.) And in the context of his column, the job numbers comment was more than a throwaway line. 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!

Comments (4)

Silly liberals.

Gov. Pawlenty speaks truth to power. The gist of his argument is right. In these challenging times, the Government is growing endlessly while Hard Working Americans are tightening their belts.

If we cut government, get it out of the way, end liberal social programs, and cut taxes, we will continue to be the best nation in the world.

Posted by Patrick from Anoka | December 16, 2010 1:23 PM

Get out of the way? You mean like the SEC and bank regulators did with mortgage-backed securities, overnight borrowing and credit-default swaps? It was deregulation that got us into this mess.

And don't preach about taxes when the GOP financed two wars and a tax cut 8 years ago without paying for any of them.

As usual, the right wingnuts spew the same crap that misses the whole picture. Your own party is willing to sell out the middle class on tax cuts so they can preserve them for people making a million plus. At the same time, they agree to a deal that adds to the deficit - I thought you people had priniciples.

Another fact: unemployment benefits return $1.25 in economic benefit for every dollar spent, high tax cuts return $.40 at best. There's more to recovery than just throwing the less fortunate to the wolves to fend for themselves. After all, no teabagger will give up their medicare or social security "liberal" entitlements.

Posted by Bill | December 16, 2010 1:38 PM

Remember, public employees pay taxes so if you cut them, you have to make up the taxes somewhere else. And you can't cut enough people to make a dent in the deficit. I don't know who he was referring to in his article but state employees haven't had a raise for a long time and even if they did, it was no more than they were getting in private business and mostly less. Maybe his own salary should've been cut? Patrick from Anoka, you had better do your homework. The "facts" you're talking about are the ones that are not true. That's what the basis of the article is and you're in essence saying the fact checkers are wrong and Pawlenty is right? You're just taking his word for it without knowing what's right or wrong. That's the problem with this country. The blind leading the blind and not thinking for themselves but rather believing what sounds good to them.

Posted by Candace Johannes | December 16, 2010 1:59 PM

Cheers Candace. PolitiFact is a Pulizer Prize winning project of the St. Petersburg Press and is hardly a "silly liberal" situation.

Besides the Truth-O-Meter, which measures the degree of truthfulness of a politician's statement, they also have an Obameter which tracks how well he's keeping his campaign promises.

Here's the link for those who can handle the truth:

http://politifact.com/about/

Posted by Sherry Berhow | December 17, 2010 3:10 AM

Services

• Hourly Newscast
• HD Radio
• iPhone App / Mobile
• E-mail newsletters
• RSS feeds
• Podcasts
• Submit your photos
• Videos
• Weather
• Most e-mailed stories