Obama's Big Stimulus Lie: The Stimulus Will Create 90% Private Jobs and Only 10% Public

At the 2:05 mark of this video President-elect Barack Obama promises 90% of Stimulus jobs would be created in the private sector and only 10% would be in the public sector. He claimed the public sector would be mostly jobs saved.


President Obama made the same claim February 8, 2009 in an address to the nation. The comment is at the 3:44 mark of the video.


Several prominent Republicans have called BS on this claim.

– Gov. Tim Pawlenty (R-MN): These are mostly government jobs, you know…The idea that government grows the economy when all they really do is extract money from taxpayers, bring it into the bureaucracy and put it back out into the economy on a political agenda is not growth.

– Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY): The stimulus bill has done “little or nothing” to stimulate the private sector. “It probably did save a lot of state government jobs.”

– Gov. Haley Barbour (R-MS): State government has benefited by the stimulus package, because it’s poured in billions of dollars. The problem is we need private sector jobs.

– Rep. John Boehner (R-OH): Most of the so-called jobs that have been saved or created are government jobs, even though the President promised that 90 percent of these jobs would be private sector jobs.

– Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA): We’ve got to begin focusing not just on jobs, but on private sector jobs

This chart from Produced by Mercatus Center at George Mason from Bureau of Labor Statistics exposes President Obama's 90% private sector and 10% public sector promise as a lie.


As you can see from the chart, the private sector has lost over 2.6 million jobs since the Recovery Act was passed. During that time, public sector employment has grown by 400,000.