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Cooking the Books
Author: BobR    Date: 03/05/2014 12:32:31

Paul Ryan (R-WI) - the failed veep hopeful of 2012 - has made it clear what he thinks of government programs that help the poor. Give a man a fish - he eats for a day, kick his ass out the door - he'll learn to fish on his own. So it's no surprise that he considers The War On Poverty to be just more of that liberal entitlement nonsense. He dislikes it so much, he's willing to cook the data to "prove" that it doesn't work.

Using widely-available research, he released "The War on Poverty - 50 Years Later". Unfortunately for him, using that public data means that others can check his work... and his work is found wanting:
“And the trends are not encouraging,” Ryan wrote. “Federal programs are not only failing to address the problem. They are also in some significant respects making it worse. Changes are clearly necessary, and the first step is to evaluate what the federal government is doing right now.”

But some authors of that research said Ryan apparently left out or ignored statistics that showed federal anti-poverty programs worked exactly as they were intended, reported The Fiscal Times.

For example, the Republican lawmaker left off data measured in a recent study of the two most successful years in President Lyndon Johnson’s war on poverty to argue that federal efforts hadn’t worked.

Researchers at the Columbia Population Research Center examined the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM), which factors in government benefits such as food stamps and the earned-income tax credit, and found the poverty rate had dropped from 26 percent in 1967 to 15 percent in 2012.

But Ryan only cited data from 1969 onward, noted one of the Columbia study’s authors, ignoring 36 percent of the total decline.
[...]
Ryan also cites the same research paper to support his claim that a 1996 welfare reform program caused a decline in child poverty, but its lead author said the lawmaker had ignored a major expansion in the earned-income tax credit in 1993 and the economic expansion at the time.

“While our data can’t disentangle those three things, attributing the decline in poverty after 1993 to the welfare reform of 1996 seems to go beyond what the data show,” said Columbia researcher Chris Wimer.

Another researcher said Ryan misstated the findings in one of her papers on the effects of housing assistance on labor.

Just like the Republicans' attempts to prevent Democratic-leaning voters from casting their vote, they are dishonest when trying to prove their economic voodoo. It's dishonorable and an insult to the country.
 

44 comments (Latest Comment: 03/06/2014 01:17:37 by Raine)
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