Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty got the growth rate of federal employee jobs so wrong he left fact-checkers, "flummoxed," PolitiFact wrote Thursday.
Pawlenty, who is promoting his national ambitions these days by going after public employee unions, wrote in a Wall Street Journal editorial: ""Since January 2008, the private sector has lost nearly 8 million jobs while local, state and federal governments added 590,000."
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!
