On Your World last week, host Neil Cavuto sneered that Treasury Secretary Jack Lew “just made …up” his claim that the sequester had prevented “a half to three quarters of a percent more GDP growth and hundreds of thousands of jobs.” In fact, the one doing the misrepresentation was Cavuto and his guest, Fox News host Mike Huckabaee.
On his August 23rd show, Cavuto played a clip of Lew's comments before saying, “I think he just made that up. How would you know? How would you know? The Treasury Secretary’s not alone though in this fear mongering. In an op-ed today, Attorney General Eric Holder saying, ‘The cuts imposed by sequestration defy common sense because they will end up costing taxpayers much more than they save.’”
Cavuto showed a Congressional Budget Office, Bureau of Labor Statistics chart showing that 867,000 jobs were created amidst a prediction of 750,000 jobs lost. Which was apples to oranges. Lew had not said no jobs would be created, he had sad fewer. And, as Media Matters noted, the very same CBO report confirmed Lew's allegation: “In the absence of sequestration, CBO estimates, GDP growth would be about 0.6 percentage points faster during this calendar year, and the equivalent of about 750,000 more full-time jobs would be created or retained by the fourth quarter.”
Nevertheless, Huckabee announced, “I don’t think we’re lying. …I think the fact is they oversold the impact of the sequestration. …They need to be able to say that the idea we’re going to hold back spending is a horrible apocalypse. …Did the sequestration have an impact on some people? Of course it did. It had more of an impact than it should have had and could have had and would have had except that the President figured how to make it as painful as possible.”
It’s not just the Obama administration, either, that has made this assessment. As News Hound Ellen wrote in a post on AddictingInfo, economists, Wall Street and the IMF all agree that the cuts are a drag on our economy. And the sequester cuts are continuing to roll out.
So, yes, Fox News is the one doing the lying here.
