The New York Times on Saturday did a mini hatchet job on Sen. John Edwards:
Welfare Queen, Meet Coatless GirlRONALD REAGAN used to talk about a "welfare queen" in Chicago with a mink coat and a Cadillac, but he got in trouble when no one was able to locate her. Mr. Edwards is on safer rhetorical ground. He does not claim to know where the poor people in his speeches live.
In his stump speech about the "two Americas," he has repeatedly deplored the plight of the 35 million Americans below the poverty line by imagining a 10-year-old girl "somewhere in America" who goes to bed "praying that tomorrow will not be as cold as today, because she doesn't have the coat to keep her warm."
...
To some critics of Mr. Edwards, a more serious question is whether the coatless girl is any more representative of America's poor than Mr. Reagan's Cadillac-driving welfare recipient. After all, clothing has become so cheap and plentiful (partly because of textile imports, which Mr. Edwards has proposed to limit) that there is a glut of second-hand clothing, and consequently most clothing donated to charity is shipped abroad. The second-hand children's coats that remain in America typically sell for about $5 in thrift shops.
"Edwards would do better to say there's a girl somewhere in America who's cold because her family can't afford to fix the furnace," said Robert E. Rector of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative research group, who has analyzed data from the Census Bureau and other agencies on the living standards of the poor. Since the typical American family below the poverty line has a car, air-conditioning, a microwave oven, a stereo and two color televisions with cable or satellite service, Mr. Rector said, it was implausible to assume the family could not afford coats.
Those last two paragraphs didn't ring true, especially the portion of Rector's claims that I've bolded above. So I went to Heritage's web site and found this chart. I then poked around enough in the original Commerce/HUD/DOE data to satisfy myself that Heritage had the numbers more or less right.
Basically, the data shows that 72.8 percent of "poor households" own a car/truck, 75.6 percent own an air conditioner, 73.3 percent own a microwave, 58.6 own a stereo (which includes "Portable/Boom Box" units, which can be had for less than $50 -- not exactly a high-ticket item) 55.3 percent have two or more color televisions, and 62.6 percent have cable/satellite television.
Rector apparently has decided that since each one of these items is owned by more than half of households in poverty, more than half of households in poverty must own all of these items.
That's silly.
As an example, say you have ten kids. Six of them have blonde hair, six have blue eyes. Does that mean that more than half -- the "typical" kid -- has blonde hair and blue eyes. Of course not; it could break down like this:
Hair__Eyes
BL___BR
BL___BR
BL___BR
BL___BR
BL___BL
BL___BL
BR___BL
BR___BL
BR___BL
BR___BL
40 percent have blonde hair and brown eyes; 40 percent have brown hair and blue eyes, and only 20 percent have blonde hair and blue eyes.
We wouldn't say, based on the fact that 60 percent of these kids have blonde hair and 60 percent have blue eyes, that the "typical kid" has blonde hair and blue eyes.
Rector's cheating; he's lying with numbers. And the New York Times bought it.
Further, even if Rector's math weren't fuzzy, this still wouldn't be proof of his point. Ownership of a boom box or a window air-conditioner says little about the purchasing power of a family in poverty. Maybe they bought the air conditioner years ago, before falling into poverty. Maybe the boom box cost $30; maybe the car cost $500 and is necessary to drive to work. Maybe because they spent that $500 on a car that is necessary, they can't afford a coat for their daughter.
This $5 coat thing is a little suspect to me as well. Even if I grant the premise that you can walk into a Salvation Army and buy a warm coat for $5, I strongly suspect that the supply of adequate warm $5 coats is smaller than the number of cold kids. Why? Partially because it just seems intuitive. And partially because I see cold kids -- and cold adults -- every day, wearing thin, warn coats that can't possibly keep them warm.
Basically, I think the NYT has been had. They deserved it, though: they relied on data from a conservative organization that generally opposes poverty programs. Did they think they'd get an impartial view of the state of poor American families from Heritage?
And when did the standard for saying a politician is stretching the truth become "a group that is ideologically opposed to him, using some fuzzy math, says he's inaccurate"?
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