PBS NewsHour offers interview of frmr Pres Clinton as balance to Pawlenty's campaign speech [View all]

[Bill USA]

On Thursday PBS Newshour didn't dissappoint in its effort to be Fox News' most ardent imitator. On Thursday's show they hosted Tim Pawlenty's astonishing litany of bald faced lies and are 'selling' their interview of Pres. Clinton the previous night as 'balance' to Pawlenty's harrangue. Pawlenty is the co-chair of the Romney campaign. Clinton isn't even associated with the Obama campaign. They should have someone who is at least associated with the Obama campaign to speak for them.

Pawlenty's speech - it wasn't an interview since he didn't really answer any questions put to him by Judy Woodruff (a couple were actually pretty good questions too). After she asked a question, Pawlenty obfuscated a bit and then just picked up with his speech where he left off and continued with the torrent of Big Lies.

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/politics/jan-june12/pawlenty_06-07.html


Here's one example about regulations being the reason for businesses not hiring more:

Pawlenty said the number one reason why small businesses aren't hiring and expanding is government being 'on their backs', i.e. regulations. Actually, a survey by the National Federation of Small Businesses polled small businessmen (Aug 2011) and the number one reason for businesses not hiring and expanding was "poor sales" --- Duh!!. The number two reason was 'taxes' but as Lawrence Mishel of indicates businesses always say taxes are too high and that in the latest survey the number of small businesses identifying taxes as the first cause for not expanding was not that much greater than their historical rate for that response and it was lower than the number identifying that as the number one cause during the George HW Bush and Clinton administrations. Regulations came in third, but again the number identifying this cause was less than had identified it during the George H.W. Bush and Clinton administrations.




In another bizarre comment, Pawlenty said "If you look at the over $800 billion stimulus that was chockful of infrastructure projects and giveaways to sub-units of government, and that didn't work."

First of all, in order to stop or delay the stimulus being enacted by filibustering, Obama had to reduce the stimulus by more than a third by converting that much of the stimulus to tax cuts. Now, anybody knows tax cuts offered at the beginning of a recession when every working person is worried about whether they will have a job in six months - won't produce stimulus. People won't spend a tax cut. They will save it or use it to pay down their debt. Which is exactly what they did. That's good personal finance, but it doesn't produce stimulus for the economy. So the stimulus was more like $560 million. That is, much less than it needed to be. But the Republicans knew they had to reduce the size of the stimulus as much as possible by threatening to filibuster.

But when Pawlenty says it didn't work, that's just blatant bullshit. The Council of Economic Advisors, the Congressional Budget Office, Moody's Analytics all concluded that the stimulus created or saved from 1.5 to 4.1 million job. USA Today surveyed 50 economists and they said the Stimulus helped the economy by preventing the unemployment rate from going lower. 70% of the economists surveyed by the Wall Street Journal said the stimulus helped the economy deal with the greatest economic disaster this county has seen since the first first Great Depression - that is, the Trickle Down - Deregulation Disaster.
(see: http://mediamatters.org/research/201006070015 )

Regulatory uncertainty not to blame for our jobs problem