Fox News turned to misleading statistics and sensational rhetoric in a renewed attack on government anti-poverty relief programs, federal workers, and public pensions.

On the August 21 edition of Fox News' Happening Now, co-host Jon Scott invited Fox Business contributor Charles Gasparino to discuss concerns regarding the scope and sustainability of government benefit programs. The two falsely portrayed government employment as a “growth industry” and made a confusing comparison between the total number of Americans receiving so-called “welfare” and the population of Russia. Gasparino lamented that more “stigma” is not attached to receiving federal aid or “living in a housing project,” before falsely concluding that public pensions face a “huge looming crisis” and are, in essence, “Ponzi schemes”:

GASPARINO: I don't think Americans are against handing people a check if they really need it, if they're starving, if they need welfare, if they need a helping hand. But we have a cultural situation in this country where it is more than that, where it is almost acceptable. The stigma is gone about accepting that check.

[...]

GASPARINO: We've become the old Soviet Union! If you threw in the state numbers, it would even be bigger. The pension issue that I brought up is one of the huge looming crisis out there. It's essentially a Ponzi scheme.

Scott's initial claim that “nearly 110 million Americans live in households on welfare,” is misleading. According to the United States Census Bureau, in the fourth quarter of 2012 roughly 109.6 million Americans resided in a household receiving “one or more means-tested programs.” These include housing assistance, disability and survivor benefits, numerous nutritional assistance programs, Medicaid, and forms of “cash assistance.” Only 5.4 million individuals lived in homes receiving from the benefit program Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), commonly referred to as “welfare.”

The portrayal of government employment as a “growth industry” is also false. According to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, total government employment across local, state, and federal agencies has declined significantly during the Obama administration and over the past seven years. Total government employment was roughly 22.6 million when President Obama took office in 2009, declining to 21.9 million today:

Gasparino's final claim that public employee pensions are “a Ponzi scheme,” is incorrect. A February 2011 report by economist Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) demonstrated that most of the long-term funding shortfall in public pensions is a result of the 2007-2009 economic crisis and the accompanying stock market downturn. Baker concluded that the debate on pensions had been “seriously misrepresented” and that most public pensions appeared “easily manageable” over the long term.

Fox News and Gasparino have a long history of misappropriating terms like "welfare" and relying on sensational comparisons of pensions to "Ponzi schemes," in addition to unsubstantiated correlations between the number of recipients of a government program with completely unrelated population statistics.