The national media is catching on to false claims from the oil, gas drilling, mobile phone industries claiming that favorable treatment to their businesses will result in millions of new jobs.

Unfortunately, our politicians for their own purposes are buying into the claims as well as to the campaign contributions that come with them.

In an excellent story in the Washington Post by Steven Mufson and Jia Lynn Yang, the newspaper looked at this phenomenon.

“Oil companies aren’t the only ones promising jobs if Washington gives them their way.

A wide array of businesses are saying they can help solve the country’s unemployment crisis if only the government would roll back some regulations, approve their big mergers or lower their taxes,” they wrote. ”

Yet the industry often touts debatable jobs numbers. Mergers between big companies, for instance, tend to result in layoffs rather than new positions overall. And a closer look shows that API’s ads exaggerate the effect that looser drilling policies would have on employment; more than half of its projected job growth would come between 2015 and 2030. Nonetheless, some policymakers and presidential candidates have cited these statistics as they echo companies’ claims about creating jobs.”

“We just learned today that if the federal government would pull back on all of the regulatory restrictions on American energy production, we could see 1.2 million jobs created in the United States,” Rep. Michele Bachmann (Minn.) said at a Sep. 7 Republican presidential debate. In a letter last month to the Justice Department, 100 lawmakers defended the merger between AT&T and T-Mobile, repeating the companies’ argument that the government’s lawsuit to stop the deal on antitrust grounds would “thwart job creation and economic growth.”