You might remember my post last week about [conservatives who can’t subtract][subtract]: in particular, about how a conservative blogger who goes by “Captain Ed” attacked John Edwards for saying there are 37 million people in poverty in the US. It turned out that good ol’ Ed wasn’t capable of doing simple subtraction.
\nYou might also remember a post about [lying with statistics][liar], discussing an article by Tim Worstall, who quoted a newspaper piece about abortion rates, and tried to misuse the statistics to argue something about sexual education in the UK.
\nWell, Tim (the target of the second piece) was pretty ticked off at my criticism; and so now, he’s back – but not with a defense of his own piece (he tried that already), but with [a response to the criticism of the first piece][liar-subtracts]. Of course, he tries to defend our good captain not by defending his math – that is, by claiming that *the point that he made* was correct; but by moving the goalposts, and claiming that the *real* point about the piece wasn’t to call Edwards a liar, but to pretend that he was *really* making an economic argument about whether or not people below the povertly line are really correctly described as poor – because, lucky duckies that they are, they get some money from the earned income tax credit! So obviously they’re not *really* poor!
\n>”Thirty-seven million of our people, worried about feeding and clothing their
\n>children,” he said to his audience. “Aren’t we better than that?”
\n>
\n>and the link is to this table at the US Census Bureau which indeed states that
\n>there are some 37 million or so below the poverty line.
\n>
\n>Right, so that must mean that there really are 37 million poor people in the
\n>USA, right? So what’s Tim bitchin’ about? Well, how about the fact that those
\n>figures which show 37 million below the poverty line do not in fact show that
\n>there are 37 million poor people? Weird thought I know but nope, it ain’t true.
\n>
\n>For this reason:
\n>
\n>The official poverty definition uses money income before taxes and does not
\n>include capital gains or noncash benefits (such as public housing, Medicaid,
\n>and food stamps).
\n>
\n>What is being measured in the first definition of poverty is how many people
\n>there are below the poverty line before we try to do anything about it.
\nThis is what those of us who know anything about logic refer to as a “non-sequiter”. That is, it’s a conclusion that has nothing to do with what came before it. It’s one of the oldest and sloppiest rhetorical tactics in the book. (Literally – I’ve got a book on classical rhetoric on my bookshelf, and it’s cited in there.)
\nEdwards was talking about the division of wealth in the US: we have people like the CEOs of big companies taking home unbelievable amounts of money, while at the same time, the income of the people in the middle class is declining slightly in real terms, and the income of the people at the bottom isn’t even approaching what they need to get by. There are 37 million people below the poverty line in this country in terms of their income. Some portion (not specified in the only source Tim and the captain cite) of those people are working, and despite working, are still not making enough money to get by. This is indisputable: there are many people in this country who are working, but who still require government assistance just to pay their bills. That’s what Edwards said.
\nWhat does that have to do with whether or not the government gives them some token assistance? The point is that our economic policies quite deliberately *refuse* to do anything to help the people on the bottom of the economic ladder become self-sufficient. Witness the recent refusal to even allow an open debate in congress on increasing the minimum wage, even while the members of congress gave themselves a raise. A person with a family, working full time for the minimum wage is left *below* the poverty line. But it’s not considered an important issue by the people currently running our government.
\n[subtract]: http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/goodmath\/2006\/07\/subtraction_math_too_hard_for.php
\n[liar]: http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/goodmath\/2006\/07\/lying_with_statistics_abortion.php
\n[liar-subtracts]: http:\/\/timworstall.typepad.com\/timworstall\/2006\/07\/good_maths_and_.html<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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