Fox confuses “bailout” with “stimulus” and declares the stimulus “didn’t work”
Posted in Main Blog (All Posts) on July 2nd, 2010 4:46 am by HL
Fox confuses “bailout” with “stimulus” and declares the stimulus “didn’t work”
Fox News repeatedly attacked President Obama’s recent town hall remarks on the stimulus by falsely referring to it as the “bailout” and claiming that it “didn’t work.” In fact, the “bailout” was first enacted under the Bush administration, and the stimulus has been estimated by both the White House and independent analysts to have increased employment by about 2 million jobs relative to a baseline estimate of what jobs levels would have been without the stimulus.
Doocy confuses stimulus with Bush’s “bailout”
Doocy repeatedly mislabels the stimulus fund “bailout.” Twice during the July 1 edition of Fox News’ Fox & Friends, co-host Steve Doocy teased segments on Obama’s remarks regarding the stimulus fund’s effect on employment by referring to it as “the bailout.” At the beginning of the show, Doocy said, “Meanwhile, the bailout has not created the jobs the president has expected, but he says there’s still a bright side.” Doocy repeated the same line later in the show.
In fact, the “bailout” refers to TARP, a Bush policy. Obama’s comments during his June 30 town hall in Racine, Wisconsin — to which Doocy is referring — were in reference to the stimulus fund, not the so-called “bailout.” “Bailout” refers to the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), which was report on the job impact of a “prototypical” stimulus package “in the range that the President-Elect has discussed,” Christina Romer and Jared Bernstein estimated that a stimulus package would raise employment by between “3.3 to 4.1 million jobs” by the end of 2010. The report clearly notes that this estimate is calculated “relative to the no-stimulus baseline.”
