Last week, Your World worked Fox’s misleading hype of the sequester into a project about the federal government’s green projects. Host Neil Cavuto pivoted with this question: “At a time when we’re spending billions upon billions doing this nonsense and seeing very little in terms of results, I’m kind of hearing the shallow echo of the sequester fears, and how much devastation it was going to cause with the sequestration cuts, most of which have been rescinded, Charles, and it’s hardly the end of the world.”
The “fair and balanced” panel was made up of Fox Business’ Charles Payne, a conservative; Heritage Foundation’s Steve Moore, a conservative; and moderate Democrat Jessica Ehrlich.
Payne agreed with Cavuto. “I think the federal government lost a job. …If you take a look at sequestration last year, if you look at GDP - 2nd, 3rd quarter of the year, substantially higher than the year before, substantially higher. You look at employment. April employment last year versus the year before, it was up 111%. In May it was up 81%. In June it was up 128%. Where was the collapsing economy? I don’t get it? …Sequestration did not send us off the rails.”
Moore also agreed. “What we learned is that federal agencies can cut five cents on the dollar. …What the government cut spending on was things like travel, conferences, paper clips that they don’t need to be doing.”
Ehrlich jumped in to mention “public parks, veterans memorials” as cuts.
Cavuto asked her, “Do you think that much of this moaning and whining about the sequestration cuts, which really were rounding error on a rounding error on a rounding error, when all was said and done, was justified?”
Ehrlich answered, “...I think what upsets the American voter and we’re going to see this again at the polls is that this was just taking the economy and using it. And the real problem we have of debt and deficit and using it as a political football to gain sort of a few points here or a few points there. There was damage done to people’s lives. The OMB even came out and said people weren’t able to pay their bills.”
Cavuto interrupted, saying that she had not answered his question. “With all the waste that’s gone on here, and all the purported horror stories from much smaller comparative cuts with sequestration, we were lied to. We were lied to.”
“The sequestration did make an impact,” Ehrlich began.
But Cavuto interrupted. “What made a bigger impact was the money we just pissed away here.”
“Oh my gosh, the Dept. of Defense, you’re talking about one small thing with algae,” Ehrlich said, referring to one of the green projects Cavuto had knocked earlier.
Actually the damage done by sequestration was much worse than what Ehrlich said. From Think Progress, in October, 2013:
While Republicans have decided to own sequestration’s cuts, the devastation continues to take a toll around the country. More than 57,000 low-income preschoolers lost their slots in Head Start. The home-bound elderly are getting fewer visits from Meals on Wheels. More than 650,000 employees at the Department of Defense have been furloughed. Cancer patients have been denied chemotherapy. Low-income families are being denied housing vouchers and the homeless are getting less support. Domestic violence victims are being turned away from support programs. Unemployment checks for the long-term unemployed have been reduced. Schools on or near military bases and Native American reservations have had to lay off staff and close schools. Other public schools have increased class sizes and fired staff. Scientists have had to fire people and shutter projects.
And it’s taken a big toll on the economy. The Congressional Budget Office found that undoing sequestration could add as much as 1.2 percent to GDP and create 1.6 million jobs. The cuts have been a drag on growth, consumer spending, and wages.
Furthermore, this segment was part of a larger pattern of Fox News cheerleading the sequester, downplaying its damage, accusing its critics of overstating the damage – and then using all that to call for more cuts.