Obama Wins Four Pinocchios

Two days in a row!

These guys are hot!

As for Plouffe’s claim about the Bay State’s employment gains, data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show Massachusetts added 22,400 private-sector jobs during Romney’s tenure. That means the state would need to have created 134,400 public-sector jobs in the same period for the White House adviser’s claim to be true. 

That’s not even close to what happened. Massachusetts gained just 5,300 state-government jobs while Romney was in office. As such, the state added more than four private-sector jobs for every state-government job. This is pretty much the reverse of what Plouffe claimed.

The best reasoning we could find to support Plouffe’s claim is that the rate of public-sector job growth for the state (4.7 percent) was about six times that of private-sector gains (.79 percent) during Romney’s tenure. But this is very different from having six times the number of new government jobs, which is what the White House adviser clearly implied when he said, “for every private-sector job created in Massachusetts by Governor Romney, six public sector jobs.”

The bottom line here is that Plouffe equated growth rates with raw numbers, thereby vastly exaggerating the amount of public-sector work the Bay State created under Romney. 

We should note that we didn’t include local or federal employment in our analysis because governors generally have little control over those numbers. Regardless, it wouldn’t have made a difference. Government jobs as a whole in Massachusetts increased at a slower rate (.46 percent) than private sector jobs (.79 percent) during Romney’s tenure.

In this regard, the state added more than 11 private-sector jobs for every government job. Again, this contradicts what Plouffe said.