Fact-Checking the Republican SOTU Response

The nonpartisan folks at FactCheck.org examine the Republican responses to President Obama's State of the Union address:

We found two new claims that we haven’t covered before:

• In the official response, Rep. Paul Ryan said that "trust in government is at an all-time low now that the size of government is at an all-time high." He’s wrong on both counts. Trust has been lower, and government has been larger, in the past.
• In her own rebuttal to Obama, Rep. Michele Bachmann said that the bailout cost "$700 billion." The net cost actually is estimated to be much less — $25 billion, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

In addition, the two Republicans repeated several false and misleading charges we’ve already written about. Our readers will be familiar with many of them, such as claims that the stimulus didn’t create jobs (it did), that the health care law hurts job growth (experts say the impact will be small), and that "16,500 IRS agents" will enforce that law (that’s based on a flawed, partisan analysis).