Democrats correct their estimate of job losses in Virginia under GOP budget plan

Democrats say they inadvertently overshot this weekend in their efforts to portray a Republican plan to cut $61 billion from the federal budget as a job killer for Virginia.

Organizing for America, a branch of the Democratic National Committee, said on their Facebook page and Twitter posts that “693,900 is the number of workers in Virginia who would lose their jobs under the Republican budget plan.”

We figured that claim was made in an error. That number would mean an almost 18 percent drop in the number of workers in Virginia — estimated at 3.9 million in January by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Alec Gerlach, a DNC spokesman, said volunteers send out the Organizing for America’s social media alerts and someone apparently wrongly used the national number as the state’s projected job losses.

“That’s an error. We’re actually correcting it right now,” Gerlach said.

The DNC later tweeted a correction.

Organizing for America is actually projecting that 19,500 workers in Virginia would lose jobs under the GOP plan, which was recently approved by the House of Representatives and now is being negotiated with the Senate. The group is projecting that 693,900 jobs would be lost nationally.

Those figures are based on a report release last month by Moody’s Analytics that the Republican plan would result in the national loss of 700,000 jobs by the end of next year. GOP leaders have dismissed the findings, arguing that decreased federal spending will eliminate fears of higher taxes and give businesses confidence to expand hiring.

Because the DNC acknowledges it made a mistake and corrected it, we are not subjecting the claim to the Truth-O-Meter.