From Democratic Underground
Dated February 20, 2002
Lies and Statistics
By Jack Rabbit
Republicans will call a parade of witnesses to say that welfare reform has worked wonderfully in weaning the poor from federal dependency on welfare and does what is needed, but more must be done to get the poor to take personal responsibility for their lives. Health and Human Service Secretary Tommy Thompson says that he and Mr. Bush want to "help those families that have left welfare to climb the job ladder and become more secure in the workforce." And Mr. Bush has said he want $100 million for experimental programs to encourage welfare mothers to get married.
Very few of the witnesses will be beneficiaries of aid programs. It's unfortunate that we won't see many poor people telling of the advantages and disadvantages of one form of government as opposed to another or how they have to stretch the rules of any system of aid in order to pay the rent and feed the kids. We will not hear - at least not from a low-wage earning mother - of how the cost of childcare must be computed into necessary monthly expenses and of how an aid program to help her pay for childcare might help her keep her job. Nor will we hear from the poor themselves about how low-wage jobs provide no medical benefits and how sometimes a child who might benefit from medical attention gets none.
Instead, most of the witnesses will be "experts." We will see well-educated men and women in business suits boldly raise their right hands, promise to tell the truth and sit down, look directly at the committee chairman with the sharp, confident glaze of one who has made his way in the world.
However, instead of telling the truth, these experts will present a display of spin worthy of Ari Fleischer, buttressed by charts, graphs and fancy terms like "regression analysis" and "bivariate correlations."
These experts present themselves as social scientists. They draw their conclusions from data set to a variety of statistical analysis. Are these experts really scientists? Or are they, like attorneys in a trial court, in the business of spinning the facts on behalf of a particular client in order to sell a particular point of view that might or might not resemble the truth?
One of the Republican-friendly witnesses will no doubt be Robert Rector, an author and a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation (see
http://www.heritage.org/staff/rector.htm). Rector recently said that, in light of the success of welfare reform and the reduced caseload, the federal government should reduce the states' block grants by 10 percent and spend $300 million, three times the amount suggested by the administration, on programs to promote marriage among the poor . . . .
It is noteworthy that in his 2001 testimony about Food Stamps, Mr. Rector has a great deal to say about the effects of aid programs on children and how aid programs discourage marriage and promote out-of-wedlock childbirth. One might expect to hear much of this from Rector and others such experts as they testify in the coming weeks. It does, after all, support Mr. Bush's plan to promote marriage as a poverty-fighting program.
It might be noted that in all of Mr. Rector's citing of statistics, data and graphs to illustrate his point, he seldom reveals anything else about the studies which he cites. Were these randomly chosen cases? What was the sample size in these studies? Anyone who has studied statistics knows that a larger sample will better reflect the universe that the data purports to represent. Finally, who performed that study? Was it an independent group of social scientists? Or was it a group who made an assertion about welfare being evil and went looking for facts to fit the pre-ordained conclusion? One would have to spend a great deal of time researching that; that's time most us don't have.
These questions might not arise if the Heritage Foundation were not so predictable. The Heritage Foundation is a conservative research and educational institute - in other words, a think tank with a partisan mission. Their mission statement makes clear that they are formulating and promoting "conservative public policies based on the principles of free enterprise, limited government, individual freedom, traditional American values, and a strong national defense" (see
http://www.heritage.org/whoweare/).
Given this, should we even expect intellectual objectivity from the Heritage Foundation? Or should we just expect them to formulate talking points for right-wing politicians?
Overall, Mr. Rector makes many specious arguments. In his 1999 testimony, he argued that Food Stamps counted as income in offsetting child poverty in an attempt to invalidate arguments that welfare reform had hurt the poor; however, in 2001, without stating that this was no longer the case, Rector attacked Food Stamps as part of a network of welfare that he blames for continued poverty. Is Rector saying that if aid offsets poverty, then it contributes to poverty? That seems to be the right-wing argument. In fact, Rector seems to be setting up the idea that all means-tested aid to the poor saps their ambition. His argument about welfare causing illegitimacy and in turn causing crime is almost laughable. While he has some reason to suggest that the old welfare rules discouraged beneficiaries from getting married, to turn around to say that illegitimacy causes crime is dreadful. How many of those illegitimate criminals were born to comfortably middle-class women with a future? Would Rector seriously argue that the child of an unmarried professional who chose to remain single is just as likely to turn to a life of crime as the child of a poor, inner-city teenager?
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