Topic: WorldNetDaily
Remember when WorldNetDaily editor Joseph Farah admitted his opinion columnists put misinformation in their columns? Well, here's a prime example. From a May 25 WND column by Michael Master:
Last week, USA Today stated that 485,000 workers had been terminated from the auto industry while only 67,000 had been rehired with the $85 billion bailout from the government.
Some pundits and lots of the media are pointing to the fact that manufacturing is hiring again. Those media and pundits are feeding us more junk. They are looking at one little fact and ignoring the elephant in the room. The elephant is that the most successful of the automakers is Ford, which did not terminate many employees and did not take the bailout. Instead, Ford renegotiated union contracts and replaced many union workers with non-union employees. At $85 billion for 67,000 rehires, that is more than $1 million per rehire for the auto bailouts at GM and Chrysler. More than $1 million per rehired worker is a horrible return on investment!
We couldn't find any USA Today article that made the claim Master asserts. The closest we found was a May 20 article stating that the auto industry lost 332,000 jobs in the recession, followed by 42,000 rehires, and it didn't mention the cost of the bailout (which CNN pegs at $80 billion, meaning Master got that number wrong too).
Also, measuring the money spent on the auto industry bailout by the number of people rehired is a meaningless metric given that the point of the bailout was to save hundreds of thousands of other jobs by keeping GM and Chrysler (as well as their suppliers) in business.
Master also ignores that the federal government will recoup much of the money it spent saving GM and Chrysler. Indeed, the same day Master's column appeared, Chrysler repaid $7.6 billion in loans, with interest, to the U.S. and Canadian governments, and Fiat agreed to buy the federal government's ownership stake in Chrysler, giving Fiat a 46 percent stake in the company.
But factual accuracy isn't Master's bag. he just wants to bash Obama:
It is clear that Obama hurt this economy: pandering to unions, printing money, pushing interest rates too low, deficit spending, expanding government and implementing the same socialism that is killing Europe – while granting more than 1,300 exemptions to Obamacare (including an exemption to AARP, the biggest supporter of the law).
If nothing else, Obama exacerbated the problems. He has been horrible for America. His economic plans are disastrous. He polarized the country rather than unite it. And he is leading America in a socialist direction, like Europe, rather than setting the pace for the world with capitalism.
And why? Because Barack Obama lacks any executive experience or respect for capitalism that is required for the president.Compare Obama to Cain, Pawlenty, Christie, Huntsman, Romney, or Trump who all have educations at least equal to Obama in business and economics and have executive experiences that make Obama look woefully inadequate.
Obama has been a horrible experiment in affirmative action that has cost America a tremendous amount, economically and to her unity.
No wonder Farah doesn't bother to fact-check his columnists. As long as they pump out the Obama-hating screeds, that's good enough for him.
