Washington Post “fact check” columnist Glenn Kessler is refusing to amend a harsh critique of a recent jobs claim by Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders even after liberal think tanks tried to rebut his criticism.
Kessler gave “four Pinocchios” on Friday to an Aug. 11 claim by the Vermont independent that the budget sequester would result in 1.4 million job losses over the next two years. He said Sanders was misreading a Congressional Budget Office study that does not support the claim.
Researchers with the Economic Policy Institute and the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities tried on Monday to knock Kessler’s critique down, arguing that Sanders had it mostly correct. The Economic Policy Institute even said the Post columnist deserved “four Pinocchios” himself. Kessler updated his post to include links to their responses, but told the Washington Examiner that he stands by his column.
“As you know, I welcome debate and disagreement and so wanted readers to know that there were objections to what I wrote. People often disagree on the Pinocchio rating — and I debated at length whether to go for the full four — but Jared [Bernstein, a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities] acknowledged that I had a point,” Kessler said in an email.
Sanders’ claim was based on an Aug. 11 Congressional Budget Office report that projected that if the sequester, a series of automatic federal budget cuts, were repealed then “full-time-equivalent employment could be 0.2 million to 0.8 million higher in calendar year 2016, and 0.1 million to 0.6 million higher in calendar year 2017, than projected under current law.” Sanders added the two higher predictions together to arrive at the 1.4 million jobs lost figure.
Kessler said that using both high-end predictions was misleading. “The most appropriate number to pick would be the midpoint,” he said.
More significantly, Kessler pointed out that the potential losses from the two years cannot simply be added together because “full-time equivalent employment” is an economic term that refers to people working during that particular year, not specifically to jobs lost or created. It is entirely possible, even likely, that many of the 200,000-800,000 people who would potentially gain full-time-equivalent employment in 2016 should the sequester be repealed also would be part of the 100,000-600,000 people predicted to be employed in 2017.
Thus, adding the two years together as “job losses” should the sequester remain, as Sanders does, would almost certainly result in substantial double-counting. The caveat is that it is not clear how much double-counting would happen because the Congressional Budget Office doesn’t say how much overlap there would be between the two years.
Another way of looking at the numbers is to say that if the sequester is repealed it may result in as many as 600,000 more people working by 2017 or as little as 100,000.
Kessler was hard in his assessment of Sanders. “There is little excuse for the senator and his staff not understanding the meaning of a letter they received from the CBO. Yes, Sanders is using a CBO document, which usually mitigates the number of Pinocchios. But he needs to learn how to read it,” Kessler wrote last week.
Josh Bivens, the Economic Policy Institute’s research and policy director, called Kessler’s column “much more misleading” than the Sanders press release that inspired it.
However, Bivens conceded that Kessler had the “tiniest grain of truth” regarding Sanders adding the 2016 and 2017 CBO projections together. He then argued that that was a misreading of what Sanders had claimed.
“Kessler is saying that one cannot claim from the CBO numbers that total employment in 2017 would be 1.4 million jobs higher if the spending caps were lifted. But Sanders and his staff never claimed that,” Bivens wrote.
In an email to the Washington Examiner Tuesday, Bivens said, “I think the issue of ‘double-counting’ isn’t a real one. If the claim was we knew that 1.4 million different people would have jobs in 2016 and 2017 due to lifting the caps, that’d be wrong (and odd).”
Here’s what Sanders specifically said in his Aug. 11 press release: “These arbitrary sequestration caps have never made any sense, and now we see even more clearly the implications for our workers. If Congress does not act to end sequestration, we’re looking at the loss of as many as 1.4 million jobs over the next two years.”
Asked if that statement backed up Kessler’s assertion, Bivens responded, “What they don’t claim is that the level of employment at the end of 2017 will be up to 1.4 million higher than otherwise. Instead, it will be up to 600k higher. But this doesn’t mean that one should ignore the up to 800k jobs that were sustained by lifting the caps in 2016 – they would be real jobs that provided income to people.”
Bivens said that Sanders’ use of the numbers was “95 percent of the way to perfectly acceptable standard practice,” though he did say that Sanders “should’ve added ‘years’ to ‘jobs’ to fully clarify the point.”
Jared Bernstein, a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, had a similar take in a response to Kessler the Post published Monday. “Based on the difference between jobs and [full-time-equivalents], I can see where the fact checker would raise an eyebrow. A more accurate way to say this might be ‘the equivalent of as many as 1.4 million full-time jobs.'”
Bernstein added that Sanders nevertheless deserved credit for “elevating this point about the economic damage from these mindless budget caps.”
