Earlier today I heard yet another ridiculous piece of fear-mongering on FOX News’ 2-hour Saturday morning business block. I forget which of the half hour shows it was on, but one of the special guests made a comment that America is losing more than 20,000 jobs each day. Twenty-thousand jobs each day.
Really?
Let’s think about that in real figures for a minute. If America was losing 20,000 jobs each day, that would be 140,000 jobs lost each week. There have absolutely been horrible announcements about new sets of layoffs each week. But if this country was losing 20,000 jobs each day, that would mean that we’re losing 7.3 million jobs each year. Ahem…losing seven million, three hundred thousand jobs each year.
This is clearly not the case. Think about it in terms of real jobs: Wal-Mart employs about 2.1 million people; McDonald’s employs some 400 thousand; Home Depot employs about 330 thousand; Bank of America has around 172 thousand employees; and Macy’s has about 182 thousand people currently employed. Combined, you’re still looking at approximately 3,180,000 workers – less than half of what the woman on the show this morning was fear mongering about.
If you believe what this fear monger believes with respect to America losing jobs, then you might believe that more than double of the equivalent amount of total jobs provided by Wal-Mart, McDonald’s, Home Depot, Bank of America, and Macy’s will be gone in a twelve month time period.
The economy is in a rough period right now and it might last for a few more weeks, months, or even years. But when people go around trying to sell fear like this it does nothing to help get the nation’s psyche back where it needs to be.
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Often times, the weekend shows on Fox News and how they parade is one of the reasons why Fox gets the label as “conservative bias.” I happen to enjoy their Saturday morning finance/business programming, such as “Forbes on Fox” and the other being “The Cost of Freedom,” I believe. They do lean heavily to the right, however.
One of the most ironic things came from Sean Hannity’s radio show on Friday night. He was so angry, asking how dare Obama and the dems use fear to scare all of us regarding our economy. He went to state that the Dems want this depression so they can grow more government power. As Hannity was crying “how dare they use fear!” it brought me back to the opposite end, when it was Dems accusing Republicans of using fear as far as terrorism goes. How Republicans were wanting to void certain liberties and expand government, in the interest of protecting us. I’m not a Bush hater, however, there were definite things that Bush did, security wise, that I thought went too far as far as encroaching on our long term liberties. It’s just funny that both sides, in completely different circumstances, bash the other side for using fear…