Friday, August 2, 2013

Harry Reid’s claim that the sequester has ‘already cut 1.6 million jobs’

“We have learned that the sequestration already has cut 1.6 million jobs. So we need job creation. We need to help the middle class by creating jobs.”
— Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), floor speech, July 31, 2013
Reid’s comment jumped out at us — 1.6 million jobs have already been lost because of the sequester? That seemed rather large.
The sequester, of course, is the automatic across-the-board spending cuts that were imposed March 1 when Republicans and Democrats could not reach agreement on a budget plan. The actual impact of the cuts has been in dispute, and we wrote a number of columns about fishy statistics that appeared to exaggerate the possible impact on the federal government.  A follow-up review in June by The Washington Post found that claims of a breakdown in government services were, in fact, overblown.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/post/harry-reids-claim-that-the-sequester-has-already-cut-16-million-jobs/2013/07/31/b40b0cfa-fa28-11e2-a369-d1954abcb7e3_blog.html 

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