Fox’s Stuart Varney and Rick Santorum used the five-year anniversary of President Obama’s stimulus package (officially named the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act) to join the right-wing misinformation squad when they attacked the stimulus program as ineffective.

On yesterday's Your World Varney opened the discussion with a Cavuto mark of an introduction: “The White House going all out to defend its $800 billion stimulus program five years later, now all but saying it didn’t cost a cent, and they say it kept five million people out of poverty. But is that stretching the truth?”

It wasn’t hard to guess what Santorum, a former Republican U.S. Senator and presidential candidate would answer. He said, “It sounds like Kathleen Sebelius and her ethics have been bled into this. …They just make it up as they go along. There’s almost no way to prove that they’re wrong because it’s hard to say, ‘Well, but for this, you have a huge economy.’ This is a very small piece of it. …It’s hard from an economic point of view to prove it. …What we can see is that unemployment didn’t go down, that the things that were predicted by the Obama administration at the time they put the stimulus in place didn’t happen.”

Varney’s idea of a challenge to Santorum was to “ask,” “Rick, would you be at all charitable to the stimulus plan and say at best it saved us from a catastrophe?”

“No, I don’t think so,” Santorum said, predictably. “First off, the amount of money that was spent and, as you know, Stuart, that money wasn’t spent right away. The old shovel-ready jobs, they weren’t shovel-ready. That money was spent over a period of years, and so when we were at the nadir, at the most difficult time when the economy did need a jolt, this stimulus package didn’t provide it. …We had double digit unemployment, that’s pretty catastrophic for a lot of folks.”

Not according to the experts.

As Media Matters noted:

A 2010 Wall Street Journal poll of economists revealed that a majority of economists agree that the stimulus boosted growth, and according to a May 2012 Congressional Budget Office report, the stimulus created the equivalent of between 900,000 and 4.7 million jobs in 2010 and between 600,000 and 3.6 million jobs in 2011. Furthermore, a February 2013 report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities illustrates how GDP growth would have been slower had the stimulus not been enacted:

 

None of that was mentioned by “fair and balanced” Varney.