We’ve previously noted that the Media Research Center’s Dan Gainor uncritically promoted a claim that an Obama administration green-jobs initiative cost $5 million per job created despite the misleading math involved at arriving that figure. The MRC liked that bogus figure so much, it repeated it again.
Julia Seymour asserted in a Sept. 21 MRC Business & Media Institute item: “The Washington Post, the $36.8 billion loan program has created only 5 percent of the 65,000 jobs promised and each job cost more than $5 million.” Seymour got the number wrong — the program has granted $38.6 billion in loan guarantees, not $36.8 billion.
In fact, as former White House economist Jared Bernstein details, the government didn’t actually spend $38.6 billion on the loan guarantee program — that assumes that all the loans will go bad, an extremely unlikely occurrence. The actual cost of bad loans that will result in the government covering for them will likely end up being under $5 billion, which Bernstein points out “gets you into a much more reasonable neighborhood re bang-for-buck.”
That the MRC would repeat a figure it must know is a fraud — and Seymour’s own sloppiness in getting one of the numbers wrong — tells us all we need to know about whether it’s a political organization or a “research” organization.