During an interview last night with Republican Senate candidate Carly Fiorina, Fox News' Sean Hannity claimed that “The only sector growing is government”:

FIORINA: To create the American dream, we have to create jobs in the private sector. We must do what it takes to make it easier for small business owners, family-owned businesses, innovators, and entrepreneurs. They create two-thirds of the new jobs in this country. They employ half the people.

We don't know how our taxpayer money is being spent in Washington, DC. We have to cut government spending. In the last 12 months the federal government has added 100,000 bureaucrats. In the last 12 months. While we're dealing with 12.4 percent unemployment.

HANNITY: The only sector growing is government.

FIORINA: That's right.

But what Hannity said is just not true. In 2010 (through August), the private sector has added 763,000 jobs while government overall (federal, state and local) has lost 40,000 net jobs.

In the following chart, the red bars represent the number of private sector employees added or lost in each month. The blue bars represent government employees -- the spike in May is from the addition of Census workers, whose employment largely ended in the following months.

Fiorina's right that the federal government has increased employment over the last year (while jobs in state and local government have decreased by a larger amount), but in the same period, the private sector grew by nearly three times as much as the federal government.

Everyone wants stronger job growth, but why does Hannity want his viewers to think the private sector has been losing jobs when in fact, it's been adding employees every month of 2010?

From the September 23 edition of Fox News' Hannity: