FactChecking the GOP Response | FactCheck.org

Analysis

Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin gave the official Republican response to President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address on Jan. 25. Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota also gave a response speech that night to Tea Party Express activists. We found factual issues with both of their remarks.

Not So ‘All-Time’ After All

Ryan was off the mark with his claims about "all-time" highs and lows in the size and distrust of government:

Ryan, Jan. 25: When government takes on too many tasks, it usually doesn’t do any of them very well. It’s no coincidence that trust in government is at an all-time low now that the size of government is at an all-time high.

Ryan spokesman Kevin Seifert said that the congressman was measuring size of government by spending as a percentage of gross domestic product. In that case, Ryan’s "all-time high" claim is off by more than 60 years.

According to historical tables from the Office of Management and Budget, federal spending as a percent of GDP was 24.7 percent in 2009, and estimated to reach 25.4 percent in 2010. Neither of those figures even comes close to the real "all-time high" figure of 43.6 percent in 1943 and 1944.

Ryan was closer with his claim about public skepticism of government, but still not quite right.

Only 22 percent of those surveyed said they trusted the federal government "almost always or most of the time," according to an April 2010 poll by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press — the source for Ryan’s claim. That’s indeed "among the lowest measures in half a century," the report noted. But the Pew report highlighted other polls conducted over the years — by other organizations — with slightly lower percentages. Case in point, polls conducted by CBS News and the New York Times in October 2008, and by Gallup in June 1994, found that just 17 percent of respondents said they trusted the government most or all of the time.

Ryan’s suggestion that the level of government trust and size of government are somehow connected was also undercut somewhat by Pew’s research. "The current survey and previous research have found that there is no single factor that drives general public distrust in government," the report said.

Stimulating Falsehoods

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, better known as the stimulus program, was a target for both Ryan and Bachmann. Ryan repeated a claim that we already debunked about the increase in domestic spending under Obama.

Ryan: The facts are clear: Since taking office, President Obama has signed into law spending increases of nearly 25 percent for domestic government agencies — an 84 percent increase when you include the failed stimulus.

It’s true that domestic spending has increased, but not nearly as much as Ryan claims. As we’ve written before, the 84 percent figure is the result of a flawed analysis by the Republican staff of the House Budget Committee.

The partisan Republican report claimed that “domestic discretionary spending” increased 84 percent from 2008 to 2010 when including the stimulus. But the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office issued a report this month that shows (on table E-7) that domestic discretionary spending rose from $485.1 billion in 2008 to $614.2 billion in 2010, an increase of $129.1 billion or 27 percent. The CBO figures include all discretionary spending, including stimulus funds in 2009 and 2010.

Also, Ryan said the stimulus "failed to deliver on its promise to create jobs." As we wrote during the midterm elections, it’s just wrong to say that the stimulus didn’t create jobs. Ryan can say — as Bachmann did — that the program failed to keep unemployment at 8 percent, as projected in a January 2009 report by the administration when it was lobbying for the bill. But the nonpartisan CBO says the stimulus increased employment by between 1.4 million and 3.6 million people in the third quarter of 2010, compared with what would have happened without it.

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